EDGEBIC Material Steps Explained: The Routing Row That Books No Capacity

EDGEBIC by User Solutions lets a routing include rows that name a component product instead of a work center. These are material steps, and the scheduler assigns them instantly and books no capacity for them. They exist so the routing can say what it consumes and where, without pretending that consuming something occupies a machine.

It is a small idea with a surprising number of consequences downstream, and it is the row people most often model wrongly.

What a Material Step Is

Every row in a bill of routing is one of two things.

An operation names a work center. It has setup time and hours per unit, it competes for capacity, it lands on a shift, and it appears as a bar on the Gantt.

A material step names a product. It has a quantity per parent unit and, where the component needs one, a lead time. It books no capacity, occupies no machine, and holds no place in a shift.

On the visual routing canvas the two are drawn differently: a machine node for an operation, a product node for a component. The product node's tooltip is explicit that it is a component consumed at that point with no capacity booked.

The step-by-step version of adding one is in how to add a material step to a routing, and the scheduling behavior in isolation is covered in how a material step schedules as an instant gate.

The Line Between Material and Sub-Assembly

The same routing row can behave two entirely different ways, and you do not choose which. The component product decides.

This is worth internalizing because it means building a routing for a product changes how every parent that consumes it is scheduled, without anyone editing those parents. A bought-in bracket is a material step. The day you start making that bracket and give it a routing, every parent that references it starts planning bracket operations on real machines.

That is the correct behavior, and it is also the mechanism behind an occasional surprise, a job that suddenly takes longer after somebody added a routing to a component. Nothing broke. The plan got more honest.

Why No Capacity

Capacity in EDGEBIC is machine and shift hours. Consuming a component uses none of them.

Giving a material step even a nominal booking would put load on a work center that is doing nothing, and every capacity number derived from that work center, its utilization, its load view, its position in a bottleneck analysis, would be wrong by that amount. Multiply that by a routing with four material rows and the distortion stops being nominal.

There is a real question hiding behind this, though: what about the time it genuinely takes to fetch and stage material? That time exists, and it belongs somewhere. It belongs on queue and transit time, which delays the successor operation without inventing machine load. Modeling handling as fake operation hours is the single most common way a routing acquires phantom capacity.

The symptom to watch for is a material row showing hours at all. If it does, either it still has a work center attached and is being treated as an operation, or hours were typed into it out of habit. A material step showing labor hours covers the diagnosis.

What the Row Is Actually For

If it books no capacity, it is fair to ask what a material step earns.

It records the structure. The routing is the definition of how the product is made, and what goes into it is part of that definition. A routing that lists only operations is a process sheet with the parts list missing.

It carries quantity. Two frames per parent unit is a multiplier that matters to demand, to cost, and, when the component has its own routing, to how much work is exploded into the job.

It carries lead time. Where a component needs procurement time, the material step is where that time enters the plan, pushing the consuming operation later rather than letting the schedule assume the part is on the bench.

It feeds cost. A component's unit cost flows into the material side of a job's cost, which is what makes a quote's cost breakdown reflect what the product is made of and not only the hours it takes.

It connects to inventory. Material demand is what the inventory ledger and the projection are working against, and it is what makes consume-from-stock netting possible: a job that can be satisfied from an on-hand balance does not have to wait on procurement at all.

Where They Go in the Sequence

A material step sits immediately before the operation that consumes it, connected into that operation. That placement is not decorative. It is what says the frame is needed at assembly, not at sawing, so a lead time on the frame delays assembly rather than pushing the whole job's start.

Getting the placement wrong is a quiet error. Attaching every component to the first operation makes the job appear to need everything on day one, which inflates the apparent procurement urgency and, on a routing with a long tail, makes a plan look infeasible that is perfectly fine. Attach each component where it is genuinely consumed.

If a material dependency is holding a job up more than you expected, a material step is holding up my job walks through the usual causes.

What It Is Not

Being clear about the boundary is worth more than any feature description.

A material step is not a purchase order and does not track one. EDGEBIC schedules; it does not manage procurement transactions against a supplier. The routing says this component is consumed here with this much lead time, which is a modeling statement, not a live view of a specific delivery.

Nor is a material step a substitute for the inventory picture. Whether a component is actually on hand lives in inventory, not in the routing, and the projection is what tells you whether the balance will cover what the plan is about to consume.

Where It Fits

Material steps are the smallest thing in a routing and the most frequently mis-modeled. Getting them right, product and no work center, no hours, quantity correct, attached at the point of consumption, is what keeps capacity numbers honest and makes the difference between a routing that describes the product and a routing that describes only its machining.

The general concept is covered in what is a material step in a routing, the complete EDGEBIC guide maps how routings feed the rest of the system, and /edgebic covers the platform as a whole.

The Row That Keeps the Others Honest

A scheduling model earns trust by not claiming things that are not true. A material step is the smallest expression of that principle: it is on the routing because the material is genuinely part of the product, and it books nothing because no machine is genuinely busy. Every hour of capacity in EDGEBIC represents a machine doing something, and that is only true because the rows where nothing is being done are honest about it.