EDGEBIC + Global Shop Solutions Integration FAQ: 12 Questions Shops Ask First

These are the questions Global Shop Solutions shops ask in the first conversation, answered without hedging: there is no certified connector, the interface is your existing exports, nothing is installed inside the ERP, and nothing you import can disturb a job already running. Each answer stands on its own, so skip to whichever one you came for.

EDGEBIC by User Solutions is a finite capacity scheduling platform that sits beside your ERP. The full walkthrough is the complete Global Shop integration guide, and the field-level detail lives in the Global Shop to EDGEBIC mapping reference.

Is there a certified Global Shop connector?

No, and it is a design decision rather than a gap. EDGEBIC integrates through reusable import masks that read Excel, CSV, delimited text, or a database source. You map your export's columns onto EDGEBIC's fields once and save the mask; every run after that is two clicks. The same architecture serves Global Shop, SAP, NetSuite, Sage, Epicor, and home-grown systems identically, so there is no per-ERP connector to certify, version-match, or repair when either side upgrades. A connector is a dependency. A file is not.

Does EDGEBIC replace any part of Global Shop?

No. Global Shop stays the system of record for quoting, materials, purchasing, costing, inventory, and financials. EDGEBIC reads exports, builds a finite capacity schedule against real shift hours and real machine counts, and hands dates and dispatch lists back as Excel. Order entry and job creation keep running exactly as they do today. The general case for that split is in why ERP needs a scheduling add-on, and the job-shop framing is in job shop ERP integration.

Does anything get installed inside Global Shop?

No. Nothing is deployed, no schema is extended, no interface user is created, and no object joins your upgrade path. The only artifacts on the ERP side are the exports your team builds, which are ordinary reports run by people who already have the permission to run them. In a shop where IT is one or two people, that difference is usually the deciding factor.

What exactly has to come out of Global Shop?

Four exports carry a complete scheduling model, and a fifth is optional. Items (an identifier is the only mandatory column). Work centers (an identifier, plus capacity detail). Routings (end product, step name, an operation flag, and hours per unit). Open jobs (item, quantity, and a date). Optionally, reported hours (job number, work center, date, and hours or pieces). Any report or query in your environment that saves to Excel or CSV is a valid source.

How long until the first real schedule?

Most shops see a first finite capacity schedule from their own data in the first working session, and a tuned one inside two weeks. The documented benchmark in the User Solutions lineage is the Plastilite integration on Fourth Shift: 5 days, Monday to Friday, from first export to a complete optimized schedule with dates synchronized back to the ERP. That figure belongs to that case rather than being a blanket guarantee, but the method is what repeats: export, map, import, schedule, tune.

Every job has a different routing. Does high mix break this?

No, it is the case finite capacity scheduling exists for. A routing file is rows of end product, work center, sequence number, and hours per unit, and the import does not care whether two products share a routing or none of them do. High mix is precisely where sequencing by hand stops working, because changeover cost depends on what ran immediately before and nobody holds that across 45 work centers and hundreds of open operations. The underlying problem is described in job shop scheduling challenges.

How does outside processing get scheduled?

As an operation on a work center that represents the vendor, with the turnaround expressed as transit days on that routing step. The vendor week then draws on the Gantt as its own block with its own dates, so downstream operations cannot start before the parts are back and the outside time becomes a number you can measure against actuals rather than padding hidden inside the operation before it.

Do we have to clean our routing data first?

No, and trying usually costs a month. Import what the ERP holds today, schedule it, and compare the dates with what your planner believes. The disagreements are your defect list and they arrive specific: a wrong hours-per-unit shows up as a job finishing implausibly early, a missing setup time shows up as a machine that appears to change over for free. Because a routing re-import wipes and recreates that item's steps, each corrected file replaces the last cleanly rather than layering on top of it.

What happens when Global Shop is upgraded?

Nothing, in almost every case. The integration reads files rather than calling an interface, so there is no connector version to track and nothing to re-certify. If an upgrade renames a column heading in an export, you re-map that column in the mask once, which takes minutes. If the export is unchanged, the masks keep running exactly as they did.

Our setup times are in minutes. Do we convert them first?

No. Put a conversion factor of 0.016667 on that column in the routing mask and a cell of 30 minutes lands as 0.5 hours. Seconds use 0.000278 and a time quoted per 100 pieces uses 0.01. Different columns in the same file can carry different factors, so one export can mix units and land correctly in all of them. The factors are saved with the mask, which makes the conversion permanent and auditable through the per-run log.

Do imported jobs schedule themselves?

No, and the separation is deliberate. An import changes data; the scheduler changes the plan. Newly imported jobs appear as unscheduled demand and stay there until you run the scheduler. Before the run starts, a confirmation states the scope in plain numbers: how many jobs are being scheduled for the first time and how many existing jobs are being rescheduled. An import can therefore never silently rearrange a shop, and you always know the blast radius before anything happens. The modes are covered in EDGEBIC scheduling modes explained.

Can an import disturb jobs already running?

No, for two independent reasons. Every scheduled job carries a frozen snapshot of the routing it was planned with, so a routing re-import affects future jobs and leaves work in progress alone. And recorded work is never moved by any run: an operation with an actual start and an actual end is historical fact, and no reschedule, mode, or setting will shift it. On top of both, imports never schedule anything.

What can import never bring across?

The settings that most change what a schedule looks like, because no ERP export has a column for them. Work center groups (machine pools re-shopped on every reschedule, with per-member efficiency factors so an older machine takes proportionally longer). The sequence-dependent setup matrix that lets the optimizer sequence work to cut changeover. Operator skills and rosters. Bottleneck anchoring. Lot streaming with transfer batches. Each is configured once inside EDGEBIC and then applies to every imported job afterwards. The EDGEBIC product overview maps them, and the ERP integration architecture explains where the import boundary sits.

Who runs this day to day?

The planner, in about twenty minutes each morning, without IT. Involve IT exactly once, to turn the four exports into saved reports that land in a known folder with stable names. After that the routine is export, run the saved masks, run the scheduler, publish the dispatch lists to each work center. For the gap-by-gap argument that usually precedes this decision, see Global Shop scheduling gaps and how EDGEBIC fills them, and for the same questions answered for other platforms, the Infor and Microsoft Dynamics FAQs follow the same shape.

Still deciding?

The fastest way to settle any of this is your own export. Pull this week's open jobs and a routing file, then bring them to a demo: mapping them live takes minutes, and you leave having watched your own shop scheduled against its own capacity.