The Manufacturing Calendar windows (Shop Calendar and Work Center Calendar) are funny. Have you ever looked at the years available in the “years” dropdown list?
The list starts with 1925! Great Plains (what is now Dynamics GP) was not even created until at least 1930 and even way back then manufacturing planners had figured out that you cannot schedule work in the past.
Seriously though, consider that the list of years is “hard coded”–the original developer typed all of those years into the list when the window was created 90s, and look how far into the future it goes:
Yup, 2026. So, somebody sat there and typed 100 years into that dropdown, filling it mostly with historical years that would not be used, and then only went forward to 2026.
What is even more astounding is that a developer can write a tiny bit of code to populate the dropdown list at the moment the window opens. So instead of entering 100 years one at a time, you could have a bit of code that says: start today, count to 10 adding +1 to the year each time. That’s it! Now the list starts at today and goes forward ten years, and it will always do that.
Well, here we are getting close to 2026, the list is hard-coded and you are going to need to schedule manufacturing orders. WilloWare’s got your back!
We just added a new TWEAK to MFG PowerPack called “Calendar Fix”. The Tweak adds years to the drop-down so it goes out 10 years (User Date plus 10 years). The Shop Calendar and Work Center Calendar are both covered by Tweak.
Lastly, the above situation is still true as of Dynamics GP build 18.6.1685, and any version of GP prior to that.