Can I see one specific machine, or only the work centre?

Both, at the same time. Work-centre roll-up and machine-centre detail sit side by side on the same screen. Some bottlenecks live at the machine level — one specific CNC, one specific oven — and they surface without you having to switch view.

What happens if I change the shift calendar?

The year view updates immediately. Add a planned maintenance window, swap a single-shift week for two shifts, mark a public holiday — every affected cell recolours on the next paint. No rebuild, no sync.

Is this the same data as the planning board?

Yes. The year view is a roll-up of the same orders, the same shift calendar, the same capacity definitions. There is no second model to maintain and no risk of the year view drifting out of sync with the live plan.

Production Planning

uScheduler Production

A production plan you can actually execute.

Most production planning tools draw beautiful Gantts that nobody can act on. uScheduler Production starts from the opposite premise: every cell on the board is a decision waiting to be made. Drag an order and capacity, tooling, qualifications, sequencing and material availability all update instantly — if something does not fit, it becomes visible. Auto-Plan proposes a feasible starting point; the planner refines it; nothing changes on the floor without the planner committing. The result is a plan you can show on a screen above the line without explaining, and defend in a sales meeting when somebody asks "when can we ship it?".

Production planning board showing work centers and scheduled orders for week 19

Functionalities · 8

Advanced tier

uScheduler Production · Year View

A full year, one screen, every work centre.

Zoom out from the day to the year. See where you have room left and where you are overbooked, week by week, per work centre or per machine centre — so the conversation moves from "can we fit this in next Tuesday?" to "where does Q3 actually break?".

Every week of the year, at a glance

One row per work centre, one column per week, 52 cells across. Blue where there is room, orange where it is tight, red where you are overbooked. Scan a row, find the squeeze.

Work centre and machine centre, side by side

Both roll-ups on the same screen. Some bottlenecks live at the work-centre level; others hide inside it — one specific CNC, one specific oven. You see both at once, no toggle, no context switch.

Drill from year to day

Click any week to drop straight into the planning board for that week. The year view is the doorway; the daily plan is where you commit.

What you see

The plan you defend at the management meeting.

The board is for tomorrow. The year view is for the conversation about hiring a second shift, buying a second machine, or pushing a customer to a different delivery window. Most planning tools force you to build a separate capacity model in Excel for those conversations — the year view shows the same source data the plan already runs on, rolled up to the weeks ops and finance already think in.

52 weeks, every work centre, on one screen
Work-centre and machine-centre roll-ups side by side
Load vs capacity in colour: blue, orange, red
Click a week to drop into the planning board
Same data as the live plan — no separate model to maintain
Holidays, maintenance and planned downtime already subtracted

Auto-plan menu: fill idle times, move to earliest possible date, move to just-in-time

When this matters

Signals you'd reach for this.

Capacity models live in Excel

Operations builds a yearly capacity model once a quarter in Excel, from data already in Business Central. Three months later it is stale and nobody updates it.

Bottlenecks announce themselves at quote time

Sales promises a Q3 delivery without knowing Q3 is already 110% loaded on the bottleneck machine. The discovery happens at scheduling — too late to renegotiate.

You cannot see the year from the daily board

The planning board is built for tomorrow. Asking it to also answer "is October overbooked?" is asking the wrong tool the wrong question.

Hiring decisions arrive too late

A second shift takes months to staff. If the overload only becomes visible in the week it hits, the decision is already late.

FAQ

The questions everyone asks first.

Still wondering? Ask us directly →

Planned hours against available capacity for each week, per work centre. Available capacity comes from the shift calendar — holidays, maintenance windows and planned downtime are all subtracted. Below 85% is blue (room left), 85-100% orange (tight), above 100% red (overbooked). Thresholds are configurable.

See uScheduler Production in a 30-minute demo.

A real screen-share with someone who built it. No slides.

The uTools suite