A Tour of the EDGEBIC Graphical Routing Designer

The EDGEBIC Designer is a graphical routing editor: your manufacturing process drawn as connected nodes on a canvas, where dragging a machine from a toolbox adds an operation and drawing an arrow defines what runs next. It is not a drawing tool that exports to a scheduler. The diagram is the routing record itself, and the finite capacity engine in EDGEBIC by User Solutions schedules straight from the arrows you draw.

This post is a guided tour: every panel, every node type, every connector, and the guardrails that keep a pretty diagram from becoming a broken schedule. If you have not built a routing before, the step-by-step flow chart building guide is the better starting point; this tour assumes a routing exists and shows you around the room.

Opening the Designer

The Designer lives on the BOR tab, next to the Data Grid button. Select a product's routing in the selector, click Designer, and the diagram loads: work center nodes, connector arrows between them, and the end product node closing the chain.

One fact anchors everything else in this tour: the grid and the Designer are the same routing. A node is a grid row. A connector is the row's Next In Sequence value. There is no export, no sync, no second copy. Planners who prefer typing use the grid; planners who think spatially use the canvas; both edit one record.

The Four Areas of the Screen

The layout mirrors how you actually work: pick raw material from the left, arrange it in the middle, tune the numbers on the right, save at the top.

The Three Node Types

Every node on the canvas is one of three things, and you can tell them apart at a glance:

The end product node is created with the routing and carries two hard rules: at least one incoming connector, and no outgoing ones. Work flows into the finished product; nothing flows out of it.

A product node with a routing of its own is a sub-assembly, marked with a star and exploded into its own scheduled steps at schedule time. That behavior gets its own deep dive in modeling sub-assemblies on the canvas.

Node boxes deliberately show a single centered title and nothing else. That is a readability decision: a 25-node diagram with hours, flags, and status painted inside every box turns into noise. The detail lives one hover away. The tooltip on any node lists sequence, setup time, hours required, queue time, flow step, instance counts, and, for special nodes, the role: parallel copy, true alternative, or sub-assembly. Hover before you edit; selecting the wrong variant of a step is the classic Designer mistake.

Connectors: Where the Routing Logic Lives

Toggle Draw Connector on the toolbar, click an upstream node, and drag onto a downstream one. The arrow that appears is the routing link: it is literally the Next In Sequence value the scheduler follows when it walks the recipe in dependency order.

Right-click any connector and you get its type menu:

• Normal (Sequential): "then do this." The standard routing link. Chains of these, ending at the end product node, are the routing.
• Parallel (Dashed): attaches an extra machine that runs alongside a step in the same time window; useful when two or three machines genuinely work the same operation together.
• True Alternative: attaches a substitute machine. At schedule time the engine evaluates each candidate against real capacity and picks whichever finishes earliest. A mill that is booked solid for three days loses to a slower mill that is free tomorrow morning.

A shape rule worth internalizing: parallel and alternative connectors attach an extra machine to a step; they never replace routing links. The Designer enforces this. If the connector menu refuses to offer the special types, the target is an end product, a product node, or a work center already in a sequence chain, and the link must stay Normal. The advanced configurations that these connectors express (parallel factors, alternative priorities, lot streaming) are the province of a scheduling engine built for job shop complexity, not a diagram convention.

The Properties Panel: Numbers Behind the Boxes

Select a work center node and the Properties panel exposes every field the scheduler reads:

The styling fields matter more than they look. Color-coding nodes by department or by machine group turns a big diagram into something a supervisor reads in seconds, the same way color pays off on the Gantt.

One panel behavior to know: if you select a parallel copy of a step, the panel shows a Parallel Work Center banner and locks most fields, because a parallel copy inherits from its parent step. Edit the parent instead; the banner tells you so.

Annotations: Context Without Consequences

Add annotation drops a free-floating sticky note on the canvas. Right-click to edit or delete. The scheduler ignores notes entirely, which is exactly their value: "waiting on tooling quote," "customer requires cert on this weld," "do not reroute without asking Maria" all belong on the diagram where the next planner will see them, not buried in a shared drive. Numbers go in fields; reasons go in notes.

Validation: The Designer Refuses to Save a Broken Chart

Click Update and the Designer validates the structure first:

• A diagram with no end product node is rejected.
• A step that cannot reach the end product is reported by name.
• An end product with outgoing arrows is an error.

Fix the connectors rather than saving around the report. A chain that does not terminate cleanly is the number one cause of operations scheduling in a strange order, and the Designer catches it while it is still a two-second fix. This is the same philosophy that runs through the whole product: catch data problems at entry, because production scheduling output is only ever as good as the routing input.

Two Designers, Two Blast Radii

The Designer appears in a second place: the Scheduled Job BOR tab. Every scheduled job carries its own frozen copy of the routing, taken the moment it was scheduled, and the Designer there edits that copy, not the standard. The job Designer adds a live header strip (job progress, actual versus estimate, current step, projected finish, due date) so you see where the job stands while you edit.

The distinction matters enough to get its own post: editing a live job's routing safely covers the frozen copy, the Use Global BOR on Reschedule flag, and the reset button with no undo.

Exporting the Picture of Record

Need the routing outside EDGEBIC, for a traveler packet or an engineering review? Switch to Data Grid mode and click Export. The output is a faithful Excel snapshot of the grid exactly as displayed: visible columns, current sort and filter, N/A markers on material rows, the star and parallel-child markers rebuilt as text, and child-row tints, opening with a legend that explains all of it. It is deliberately not the import format; loading routings in bulk goes through the import masks, which accept Excel and CSV.

A Tour Is Not a Test Drive

The Designer reads well on paper, but the moment it clicks is when you drag your own bottleneck machine onto the canvas and watch the arrow you drew become booked hours on a schedule. User Solutions has been putting visual, data-driven scheduling in front of manufacturers since 1991, and the pattern holds from five-machine shops to the enterprises in our history (US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, Cummins): people trust a schedule they can see.

Explore the full EDGEBIC platform, read the visual scheduling pillar guide for how the Designer connects to the Gantt, or bring one messy routing to a demo and draw it with US.