EDGEBIC + Fishbowl: The Complete Scheduling Integration Guide

Integrating Fishbowl with EDGEBIC means exporting the parts and open manufacture orders Fishbowl already holds to Excel or CSV, mapping those columns once with a reusable import mask, and letting EDGEBIC schedule the work against finite capacity: real shift hours, real machine counts, and sequence-dependent setups. Fishbowl carries parts, inventory, and manufacture orders well; the operation-level routing it does not carry (work centers and run and setup times per step) is built once inside EDGEBIC. Executable dates then export back for your team and your customers. There is no add-in inside Fishbowl and no certified connector to maintain through an upgrade.

EDGEBIC by User Solutions is the newest generation of a scheduling line that has integrated with business systems this way since 1991. Across 35+ years the same file-based approach has fed schedules for the US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, and Cummins, including Cummins scheduling across 33 locations from AS400-era data. This guide covers the Fishbowl case specifically: what to export, where the routing detail comes from, what the engine does with the result, and what a realistic first two weeks looks like.

Where Fishbowl stops and detailed scheduling starts

Fishbowl is very good at inventory and order management. Parts, stock levels, purchase orders, manufacture orders, and the bill of materials all belong there and should stay there. What Fishbowl does not do is finite capacity scheduling, and that is the gap a planner feels every morning:

• Which of these open manufacture orders actually fits on the constraint machine this week?
• If the rush job jumps the queue, which promised dates slip and by how much?
• Is the assembly cell loaded to 80 percent or 140 percent next Tuesday?

Those are finite capacity questions, and answering them means modeling shifts, machine instances, changeover sequences, and operator skills against every open order at once. Fishbowl schedules manufacture orders by date and availability but does not sequence them against real machine capacity, which is why a dedicated scheduling layer beside it is the standard pattern. The general argument is in finite versus infinite capacity scheduling, and the wider product comparison is on the RMDB versus Fishbowl page.

The integration in one table

The EDGEBIC ERP integration architecture is identical for every system, Fishbowl included:

An import mask is a saved recipe. It remembers which kind of data you are importing, what format it arrives in (an Excel workbook, or comma, semicolon, tab, or space delimited text), whether the first row carries headings, and how each column of your file maps onto an EDGEBIC field. You build it once by dragging your file's column headings onto EDGEBIC's target fields. Every run after that is two clicks: pick the mask, press Do It.

Every row in your file produces exactly one outcome: Created, Updated, Reused (found and deliberately left alone), or Failed (rejected, with the reason recorded). A result dialog shows the counts and a per-run log file records every row. Nothing half-imports silently.

Step 1: export parts and manufacture orders

Two Fishbowl exports carry the demand and the item master, and an optional third gives you a routing scaffold.

1. Parts. The part number, description, unit of measure, and any cost or price columns you want visible. The identifier is the natural key and matching is case-insensitive, so PUMP-A in the file finds Pump-A in the database.
2. Open manufacture or work orders. Part, quantity, order reference, and dates.
3. Bills of material (optional). One row per component, useful as a scaffold when you build routings.

Any report or export in Fishbowl that saves to Excel or CSV is a valid source. You are not writing plugins, not touching the database directly, and not asking for a new interface. The file is the interface.

Step 2: build the routing detail once

Fishbowl gives you parts and a rough bill of materials, but not the operation detail scheduling needs. You supply that one time, two clean ways:

• Draw it. In the graphical routing designer you place each operation on a work center, set hours per unit and setup time, and connect the steps in order.
• Import it from a spreadsheet. Write one row per operation (end product, work center, sequence number, hours per unit, setup time) and load it through the BOR mask. A Fishbowl bill of material export makes a useful starting point here: the parts and rough sequence are already listed, and you add the work center and the times.

Number sequences in gaps of 10 so inserting a step next quarter becomes 25 and nothing renumbers. Work centers are entered directly or loaded from a small spreadsheet whose most important column is Number_Of_Instances, the count of identical machines each center holds.

Step 3: why the routing import takes two passes

Routings are the hardest data to build because operations reference each other: step 10 feeds step 20 feeds step 30. A naive row-by-row import cannot wire those links, because step 20 does not exist yet when step 10 is written.

EDGEBIC's routing import therefore runs in two passes. Pass one reads and validates every row, auto-creates any work center or product the file names that does not exist yet, and buffers the steps. Pass two groups the buffered rows by end product, sorts them by sequence number, writes them, and then wires the chain: 10 to 20, 20 to 30, and the terminal step to the finished product so the routing renders as one connected flow.

Keep all of one product's steps in one file, because a routing import wipes and recreates that product's steps once per run, which is what makes re-imports idempotent. And re-importing is safe for running orders, because every scheduled job carries a frozen snapshot of the routing it was planned with, so a routing change applies to future jobs and leaves work in progress untouched.

Step 4: orders in, then run the scheduler

The order import maps part, quantity, reference, and dates. When your export carries an order reference, rows sharing that reference group under one sales order and their jobs auto-number as {Ref}-{line}, which keeps a multi-line order together instead of scattering it.

One rule matters more than any other: imports never schedule anything. After the run, imported orders sit as unscheduled demand. You then run the scheduler, which states its scope before it plans (how many jobs are new and how many existing jobs are being rescheduled), and the new work slots around everything already committed on the floor. Data movement and planning stay separate on purpose. The modes are covered in EDGEBIC scheduling modes explained.

Once the data is in, the whole engine applies to your Fishbowl work: finite capacity across multiple shifts and machine instances, work center groups that re-shop the machine pool on every reschedule, a sequence-dependent setup matrix, lot streaming with transfer batches, operator skills, and mathematical optimization with a proven optimality gap. The EDGEBIC product overview maps the engine.

Step 5: sending executable dates back

The return trip is Excel. The Job View grid exports the job schedule as a workbook with colored cells and a legend sheet. The work center schedule exports the same way, and every report dialog exports to Excel or PDF using the column layout you saved, which turns a dispatch list into a saved report rather than a document someone rebuilds each morning.

From there, revised dates go back into Fishbowl through whatever date field your manufacture order process already uses. There is no automated write-back, which is deliberate: your inventory data stays under your team's control. The category framing is on the ERP scheduling add-on page.

A realistic first two weeks

The method behind this guide has a documented benchmark in the User Solutions lineage: at Plastilite Corporation the ERP vendor itself recommended User Solutions scheduling, and the team went from first export to a complete optimized schedule with ERP integration in 5 days. Fishbowl shops usually spend the extra runway on the routing build, because the part and order files map quickly.

If you are starting from an empty database, the green-field setup walkthrough covers the sequence in detail, and the Fishbowl to EDGEBIC data mapping reference is the field-level lookup you keep open while building masks.

Prove it with your own export

The fastest evaluation is not a feature list, it is your own file. Export this week's open manufacture orders and your part list, then bring them to a demo. Mapping them live takes minutes, and once one routing exists you leave having watched your own plant scheduled against its own capacity. Shops weighing several systems can also read the QuickBooks and Odoo versions of this guide: the method is identical, which is the point.