Overview
Most manufacturers reach a point where the spreadsheet stops working. This post walks through a live demo of VAPS, the visual production scheduler for Business Central, and what it changes for planners on the shop floor.
Key Takeaways
- VAPS turns Business Central production data into a drag-and-drop Gantt chart, so planners see capacity, routings and due dates in one visual screen.
- Real-time inventory updates cut the risk of overselling the same item across channels.
- It runs inside Business Central itself, reading live data from the planning worksheet and production journal rather than copying information into a separate system.
- VAPS switches Business Central’s default backward scheduling to forward scheduling, treating resource capacity as a hard constraint and the due date as a soft one.
- Earliest Material Availability Date (EMAD) flags when a production order will be short of components, so planners catch material problems before they cause a delay.
- Simulations let planners test scheduling changes in a safe draft copy and compare options before publishing anything back to live data.
- Implementation is mostly about getting your manufacturing setup right in Business Central first. Once that’s in place, installing VAPS itself is quick.
Manufacturers running Business Central usually reach the same wall eventually. Production orders pile up, one person holds the plan in their head or in a spreadsheet, and everyone else is left chasing updates. Delivery dates turn into guesswork rather than commitments.
On 10 September 2026, Tecvia hosted a joint webinar with Boyum IT to show how VAPS, the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler, solves this by making Business Central’s scheduling data visual. Walter Milanesi, Global Enablement Lead at Boyum IT, ran a live demo covering how the tool works, what makes it different, and how manufacturers get started with it. This post pulls together the key points from that session.
Why Business Central Manufacturers Reach for VAPS
Michael Main, who leads business development at Tecvia, opened the session by naming the problems Tecvia sees repeatedly among manufacturing clients: balancing capacity, managing shifting production priorities, and keeping visibility across the whole operation as customer demand changes.
Business Central already handles this data. It holds your resources, your routings, your production orders and your due dates. The problem isn’t missing information. It’s that the information sits in tables and worksheets rather than somewhere a planner can see it, understand it and act on it quickly.
VAPS addresses that gap directly. As Walter explained, the goal was to represent Business Central’s manufacturing data as a Gantt chart, so planners can drag and drop operations, spot bottlenecks visually, and let automation handle the repetitive parts of scheduling.
The Gantt chart capacity view showing the timeline, resource list and coloured operation bars
What Makes VAPS Different From Other Scheduling Tools
Walter was clear about the first thing that sets VAPS apart. It runs fully inside Business Central rather than as a bolt-on system that needs data pushed to it.
That matters for two reasons. First, security. Nothing gets copied or exported to a third-party platform, because the scheduling tool lives inside your ERP. Second, because VAPS reads directly from Business Central’s planning worksheet and production journal, planners always work from the latest information in the system. There’s no separate data feed to keep in sync and no risk of working from a stale export.
This is a meaningful distinction if you’re comparing production scheduling software for Business Central against standalone planning tools. A separate system means duplicate data entry and a second source of truth to maintain. VAPS avoids both.
Forward Scheduling and Finite Capacity, Explained
One of the most useful changes VAPS makes is to how Business Central schedules by default.
Standard Business Central uses backward planning. You set a due date, and the system works backward to calculate when each operation needs to start so the order finishes on time. It’s a logical approach, but it assumes your resources have unlimited capacity to hit that plan.
VAPS flips this to forward planning. It treats the capacity of your machines and people as the hard constraint, and the required due date as a soft target the system tries to respect wherever possible. If you have the capacity, VAPS schedules the order. If you don’t, it tells you the plan isn’t achievable rather than quietly overloading a resource.
For planners, this is the difference between a schedule that looks complete and one that’s actually deliverable.
Three Views for Three Different Jobs
VAPS gives planners three ways to look at the same underlying data, each suited to a different task.
The capacity view is where the daily work happens. This is the drag-and-drop Gantt board, organised by work centre and machine centre, where planners move operations, resolve clashes and apply automation.
The production order view groups the same data by production order instead of by resource. It’s read-only, but it’s built for spotting problems fast. Each order shows a grey diamond marking its required due date. A grey diamond means the order is on track. A red one means it’s running late, and clicking through takes the planner straight to that order in the capacity view to fix it.
The sales order view works the same way, grouped by sales order, so customer-facing teams can check delivery commitments without needing to interpret the production side.
Production order view with its red and grey diamonds
The manual drag-and-drop functionality is the simplest way to work with VAPS, and Walter demonstrated how much it can absorb on its own. Moving one operation to a new slot automatically pushes every subsequent operation along the same routing, recalculating the knock-on effect across the whole production order in seconds rather than the hours it would take to do the same thing manually in Business Central’s underlying tables.
VAPS also supports alternative machine centres. Where Business Central’s standard setup assigns one resource per operation, VAPS lets planners define backup resources for the same step. If a machine is booked solid, the system can automatically check whether an alternative resource finishes the job sooner.
For new production orders sitting in the standby area (VAPS highlights unscheduled orders in yellow so nothing gets missed), planners can apply a saved routing with a single right-click, or apply the alternative routing option to let VAPS pick whichever available resource finishes fastest.
For larger volumes, the bulk scheduling option lets planners sort every unscheduled order by priority, whether that’s due date, customer or a custom field, and schedule the entire list in one action. Business Central’s manufacturing module already holds the routing logic. VAPS just applies it visually and at scale.
EMAD: Scheduling Around Material Availability, Not Just Capacity
Capacity is only half the scheduling problem. The other half is whether the materials will actually be there.
This is what EMAD, the Earliest Material Availability Date, is built for. VAPS checks every component on every production order against reservations, inventory, and any other document with a relevant date, including purchase orders and transfer orders, to calculate the earliest point every part will be available.
In the Gantt chart’s availability view, this shows up as a simple colour code. Green means every component is available for that operation. Red means something is missing. Planners can drag the operation forward in time and watch the colour change once the shortage clears, without needing to dig through separate purchasing or inventory screens.
Walter recommended running the EMAD calculation at least once a day, ideally overnight, since it can take 15 to 25 minutes to process in a live environment even though it’s near-instant on demo data. Run it as a scheduled task and planners arrive each morning to a fully updated picture.
It’s also flexible enough for real-world exceptions. Components you always have in stock, such as standard packaging, can be excluded from the EMAD check entirely, so the view stays focused on materials that genuinely carry risk.
The availability view showing a red operation bar next to a green ones
Simulations: Testing Changes Without Touching Live Data
Perhaps the most reassuring part of VAPS for planners nervous about a new tool is how it protects live data.
Every simulation is a draft. When a planner creates one, VAPS copies the relevant production data into its own internal tables. Every drag, every reschedule and every bulk update happens inside that copy. Nothing changes in the live Business Central environment until the planner reviews the result and clicks publish.
Because simulations are drafts, planners can run more than one at a time, compare different approaches to the same scheduling problem, and publish only the one that works best. If a change turns out to be wrong, closing the simulation without publishing leaves live production data untouched.
This separation of scheduling from execution is what makes VAPS practical for day-to-day experimentation. Planners can test a “what if we moved this order” scenario freely, because testing it carries no risk to the actual plan.
Getting Started: What Implementation Actually Involves
During the Q&A, Michael asked how long implementation typically takes for a manufacturer new to this kind of tool, and when they’d start seeing the benefit.
Walter split the answer into two parts. The heavier lifting happens before VAPS is even installed: defining your manufacturing processes, setting up resources correctly, and getting routings configured properly in Business Central’s manufacturing module. This is standard groundwork for manufacturing in Business Central generally, done in partnership with your implementation partner.
Once that foundation is in place, adding VAPS itself is straightforward. It installs from Microsoft AppSource and reads directly from your existing Business Central data. There’s no extra database to build and no new tables to maintain. Walter noted that some organisations even use VAPS as a way to help new planners learn the manufacturing module faster, since seeing the schedule visually makes the underlying logic easier to understand.
A second question from an attendee asked whether production orders with 70 or more components would all appear separately in the scheduler, or whether specific lines could be excluded. Walter confirmed VAPS checks every component in the bill of materials by default for availability, but planners can set exceptions in the EMAD calculation for items that are never a genuine risk, such as standard packaging, even though they remain part of the bill of materials.
What This Means for Your Business
If your production plan currently lives in someone’s head, a spreadsheet, or a set of Business Central screens that only one person really understands, VAPS addresses all three problems at once. It gives your whole team a shared, visual view of production, backed by real capacity and material constraints rather than guesswork.
For manufacturers already running Business Central, this is a natural next step rather than a system change. The data is already there. VAPS just makes it visible and actionable, without asking planners to learn a second platform or trust a second source of truth.
If capacity clashes, missed due dates or manual replanning are eating into your team’s time, it’s worth seeing VAPS working against your own data rather than a demo environment.
Speak to Tecvia about VAPS and Business Central manufacturing or explore our Business Central overview and implementation services to see how a manufacturing setup like this comes together. If you work in manufacturing and engineering specifically, our Manufacturing & Engineering industry page covers the wider picture beyond scheduling.
FAQs
For anything not covered here, get in touch directly. We’re happy to answer questions specific to your business and your ERP requirements.
VAPS, the Visual Advanced Production Scheduler, is a Boyum IT add-on for Business Central. It turns production data into a drag-and-drop Gantt chart so planners can schedule, resolve capacity clashes and check material availability visually, without leaving Business Central.
No. VAPS reads directly from your existing Business Central manufacturing data, including the planning worksheet and production journal. It adds a visual scheduling layer on top rather than replacing any underlying functionality.
Most of the implementation time goes into setting up resources and routings correctly in Business Central’s manufacturing module, which is standard groundwork done with your implementation partner. Once that’s in place, installing VAPS from Microsoft AppSource is quick, since it reads from data that already exists.
Yes. VAPS checks every component on the bill of materials for availability by default. Where certain items, such as standard packaging, are never genuinely at risk, you can set exceptions so the EMAD calculation focuses only on components that carry real scheduling risk.
EMAD stands for Earliest Material Availability Date. VAPS calculates it by checking reservations, inventory, purchase orders and transfer orders for every component on a production order, then flags whether the materials needed will be available by the planned run date.
No. Every scheduling change happens inside a simulation, which is a draft copy of your production data. Nothing affects live Business Central data until you review the result and choose to publish it.
