The EDGEBIC Scheduling Glossary Index

A manufacturing scheduling glossary is only useful if it defines terms the way the software actually behaves, not the way a textbook wishes it did. This index organizes the EDGEBIC glossary by theme, so you can find the definition you need by where the term lives in the work rather than by guessing its first letter.

Every entry is written the same way: a standalone definition first, then how it works, then a concrete example, then how EDGEBIC by User Solutions uses it. Below are the most-consulted terms grouped by subject area. The full glossary runs to several hundred entries and is browsable from the blog index; this page is the map, not the territory.

A word on why the vocabulary is as large as it is. Scheduling terminology accumulates in layers. Some terms are industry-standard and predate any software: bill of materials, setup time, lead time. Some come from a body of theory that the engine implements directly, such as the drum, the buffer, and the rope of constraint management. And some exist only because a finite capacity scheduler has to model a distinction that a simpler system never makes, which is why words like machine instance, setup family, and transfer batch have no equivalent in most ERPs. Where a term is generic, the definition says so and stays generic. Where EDGEBIC gives it a specific meaning, the entry says that too, because the gap between the textbook and the software is exactly where planners get caught.

The Scheduling Engine

These are the terms that describe how a plan gets built. If you read only one group, read this one.

The direction decision comes first: forward scheduling starts from now and pushes work as early as capacity allows, backward scheduling works back from a due date, and direction precedence is the rule that decides which applies to a given job. A scheduling mode names the whole family.

The core constraint is finite capacity, whose opposite is infinite capacity planning. Work is placed by a greedy scheduling pass over a dependency graph, ordered by topological sort, which is why job order matters so much.

Routing structure has its own vocabulary: a bill of routing with its sequence numbers, setup time, run time per unit, queue time, move time, and transit time.

Advanced routing behavior is where most of the depth lives: lot streaming and its transfer batch, FlowStep overlap, independent parallel processing versus dependent parallel processing, a true alternate work center, and an anchor step.

Constraint theory terms appear because EDGEBIC implements them: theory of constraints, drum-buffer-rope, the constraint buffer, the shipping buffer, and the bottleneck work center they all revolve around.

Dispatch rules that name an ordering: earliest due date, shortest processing time, longest processing time, and critical ratio.

And the measures of a finished plan: makespan, tardiness, days late, an idle gap, and schedule nervousness.

Capacity, Work Centers, and Calendars

Where the hours come from, and how they run out.

Available capacity is the starting point, compared against demand as load vs capacity and expressed as capacity utilization. A work center type and its capacity type decide how a resource behaves, and pieces per hour is the alternative to an hours-based rate.

Multiple machines behind one name introduce the machine instance, per-instance capacity, an instance selection strategy, and the instance collision that signals a modeling error.

Pooled machines are handled by a work center group, whose members carry a factor from base against the nominal primary. Group explosion and re-shopping describe how a group is resolved at schedule time, and a selection strategy decides which member wins.

Time itself: a work center shift, shift time, the shift priority score, an overnight shift wrap-around, a cross-shift operation, a plant holiday with its holiday scope, and the difference between a working day and a calendar day.

Two settings that are frequently confused: work center efficiency and the schedule-at-utilization setting, which is set per job.

Materials, Inventory, and Planning

The demand and supply side of the plan.

Planning fundamentals: material requirements planning, manufacturing resource planning, capacity requirements planning, and advanced planning and scheduling.

The netting arithmetic: a gross requirement, a net requirement, a scheduled receipt, a planned order receipt, and the projected available balance that results.

Replenishment policy: a reorder method, a lot size rule, safety stock, a replenishment suggestion, and yield, which inflates a suggested build quantity after lot sizing and applies to the suggestion only.

Demand: a demand forecast, forecast consumption, firm demand, a time fence, firming, available to promise, and make-to-stock versus make-to-order.

Stock truth: the inventory ledger, quantity on hand, an inventory receipt, an inventory issue, an inventory adjustment, and moving average cost.

Structure and scheduling of demand: a bill of materials, a sub-assembly, an end item, a manufacturing order, a master production schedule and its buckets, plus sales order lines and open quantity.

Shop Floor Execution

What the floor reports back, and what the schedule does with it.

The shop floor kiosk captures work as punches: a punch type, a punch source, and a punch adjustment. Pauses carry a reason code within a reason category.

The results become actuals, summarized as planned vs actual hours, production hours, and percent complete. A partial completion and mark complete close a step out.

Replanning around recorded work: a reschedule, actuals preservation on reschedule, a frozen window, a targeted reschedule, and routing drift.

Operators: a skill, an operator certification, a shift operator roster, operator time off, and attend fraction, which is how one operator covers several machines.

Reporting and Measurement

OEE and its three components, availability, performance rate, and quality rate, sit at the center. Around them: on-time delivery rate, OTIF, schedule adherence, schedule attainment, throughput, work in process, first pass yield, and lead time.

Earned value reporting brings its own set: earned value, planned value, actual cost, budget at completion, estimate at completion, cost performance index, and schedule performance index.

Diagnostics have names too, because EDGEBIC checks for them: a scheduling anomaly, an over-utilization check, a dependency violation, a plan inversion, and lost hours.

Quoting and Optimization

Quoting terms: a quote simulation, a quote scenario, estimated lead time on a quote, the labor and material cost basis, margin percent, and markup percent. Costing is labor and material only.

Optimizer terms: multi-run optimization, the never-worse clamp, an optimality gap, an objective preset, a warm start, an optimizer proposal, and a job-level feature lock.

Data, Import, and Setup

Import mask is the term to know first, followed by the import entity type it belongs to, the import row status each row receives, and the import run log that records the outcome. An upsert explains the create-or-update behavior, a conversion factor turns minutes into hours, and row-error tolerance decides how much bad data aborts a run. A grid export snapshot is the export side, and it deliberately does not round-trip.

Changeover setup: a setup family, a setup matrix entry, and the setup source that decides which value applies.

Reading the Schedule on Screen

The visual layer has vocabulary of its own, and it is worth learning because most planners meet these terms as colors and shapes before they meet them as words. A Gantt baseline is the saved comparison line that shows how far a plan has moved. An operation state in a production Gantt is what the color of a bar means. A job display mode and a timeline view mode control how much of the plan is on screen at once, and a drag write mode decides what happens when you move a bar with the mouse. Alongside them, a work center dispatch list is the plan as the floor sees it, and a KPI tile is the plan as management sees it.

Two more that come up in conversation constantly: the original scheduled date, which is what a job was promised before anything moved, and the schedule change log, which is the record of what moved and when.

Terms That Describe How the System Behaves

A small group of terms describe the software's own rules rather than manufacturing. They are worth knowing because they explain behavior that otherwise looks arbitrary. Last-write-wins concurrency explains what happens when two planners save at once. Atomic rollback explains why a failed scheduling run leaves nothing half-written. Override and warn describes the pattern EDGEBIC uses instead of a hard block, where you are told the consequence and allowed to proceed. A security role is how access is granted, and permissions come from roles.

Using This Index

Each definition stands alone, so you can arrive from a search, get an answer, and leave. If you are learning the platform rather than looking up one word, the guides are the better entry point: the complete EDGEBIC guide for the whole platform, the scheduling engine guide for how plans are built, the planning guide for inventory and demand, the shop floor guide for execution, and the troubleshooting guide for when a schedule looks wrong.

To see the terms as live screens rather than definitions, contact US for a demo, or read more about EDGEBIC.