Answer the customer's delivery question without leaving your desk

What this module does

A customer calls Friday afternoon asking when their order will ship. Without a single project timeline, the project manager hangs up to “check on it,” walks to the planner, opens the production order, opens the bill of materials, opens four purchase orders, opens a spreadsheet someone updated on Wednesday, then calls the customer back Monday with an answer that may or may not still be true. With one, the project manager opens one screen, reads the answer to the customer in the same minute, and explains why a specific component is the constraint without leaving the page.

Key pages

Project shows a single project as a week-by-week timeline. Production rows span their planned dates, purchase rows span order to in-house dates, and progress follows what has actually been posted and received. The active bill of materials is chosen automatically, so what is on the screen is what is actually getting built. An operation still under way can be replanned in place by moving its anchor date; the change writes back to Business Central and the timeline redraws, so a slip is one decision instead of forty calendar edits. Beside the timeline, an on-time delivery view tracks every open sales line as promised date against projected date, charting the ratio over time.

Project Managers stop reading four screens to answer one question. When a vendor pushes a date, the project manager sees it move on the timeline the same day, calls the customer before sales hears about it, and offers a new date that comes from the same source as the production order. Project sponsors and executives read the on-time ratio at the start of each week and see which projects need attention before the next stand-up. Sales books the next quote knowing what dates the shop floor can actually hit, instead of which dates the team will work overtime to meet. The Friday afternoon call ends in five minutes.