EDGEBIC + Infor Integration FAQ: 12 Questions Plants Ask First

These are the questions Infor plants 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 an order 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 Infor integration guide, and the field-level detail lives in the Infor to EDGEBIC mapping reference.

Is there a certified Infor 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 Infor, 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.

Which Infor product line is supported?

All of them, and this is the most common first question because Infor is a family rather than one system. The masks read what an export produces, not what an API version exposes, so there is no product-line qualification step and no version matrix. If your environment can save a report to Excel or CSV, you can schedule from it. That also means a group running different lines across sites uses one method instead of several integrations.

Does EDGEBIC replace any part of Infor?

No. Infor stays the system of record for materials, procurement, costing, inventory valuation, 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, material planning, and purchasing keep running exactly as they do today. The general case for that split is in why ERP needs a scheduling add-on.

Does anything get installed inside Infor?

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 authorization to run them.

What exactly has to come out of Infor?

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 production orders (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 plants 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.

Should a multi-site Infor estate import into one database?

Split by scheduling decision rather than by ERP structure. If sites share machines, share operators, or transfer work between plants, keep them in one database and use departments to group each site's work centers, because the engine can only balance load across resources it can see. If each site plans independently and never borrows capacity, a database per site keeps files small and each planner's view focused. The number of orders is rarely the deciding factor, since imports stream row by row rather than loading a whole workbook into memory.

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 an order 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 Infor 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 standard times are per lot of 100. Do we rebuild the routings?

No. Put a conversion factor of 0.01 on the hours column in the routing mask, and a cell of 2.5 hours per 100 pieces lands as 0.025 hours per piece. Setup minutes on the same file use 0.016667 on their own column, so one export can carry two different units and land correctly in both. The factors are saved with the mask, which makes the conversion permanent and auditable through the per-run log.

Do imported orders schedule themselves?

No, and the separation is deliberate. An import changes data; the scheduler changes the plan. Newly imported orders 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 plant, and you always know the blast radius before anything happens. The modes are covered in EDGEBIC scheduling modes explained.

Can an import disturb orders 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 if someone runs the same file twice?

Nothing bad happens, on any entity type. Master data comes back Reused (matched and deliberately left untouched) unless you explicitly enabled updates for that run. Routing imports wipe and recreate an item's steps rather than appending, so steps never accumulate. Actuals always overwrite the days a file carries, so a double import never double-counts and a corrected file simply fixes the earlier numbers. The import system assumes files get re-run, because in real plants they do.

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). 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 order 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. For the gap-by-gap argument that usually precedes this decision, see Infor scheduling gaps and how EDGEBIC fills them, and for the same questions answered for other platforms, the Microsoft Dynamics and Global Shop Solutions FAQs follow the same shape.

Still deciding?

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