The EDGEBIC Resource Calendar Explained: Pool Capacity at a Glance

EDGEBIC by User Solutions provides a resource calendar that shows a work center group's available capacity per day as the live sum of its member machines, so a planner reads a pool's true supply directly while the group itself holds no capacity of its own to drift or double count. When a plant runs several interchangeable machines, planning them one at a time and combining their availability in your head is slow and error prone. The resource calendar does that combination for you, correctly, and keeps it correct.

This is the capacity lens on the work center groups feature, the machine pools a routing can target instead of naming a single machine. The group decides which member runs an operation; the resource calendar shows how much the pool can absorb.

A Pool With No Capacity of Its Own

The defining design choice is that a work center group has no stored capacity. It is a named set of member machines, and nothing more on the supply side. Its number on the resource calendar is not a field anyone maintains; it is computed on the fly by summing each member's current capacity for the day.

That sounds like a small implementation detail and is actually the whole safety argument. If a group carried its own capacity figure next to the real machines beneath it, the scheduler would face two sources of supply that could disagree, and a plant could plan against hours no machine actually has, which is phantom capacity. By making the pool total the live sum of real member hours, EDGEBIC guarantees the number is always exactly what the machines provide, never more. For how the group explodes into real machines at schedule time, see how EDGEBIC picks the best machine in a pool.

Live Means Zero Maintenance

Because the pool total is summed rather than stored, the resource calendar needs no upkeep of its own. You manage the member work centers exactly as you always have: their shifts, their holidays, their instance counts, their per-day overrides. Every one of those changes flows straight into the pool total the next time you look, because the total was always a sum of those inputs.

Add a machine to the group and the pool grows. Put a member on a holiday and the pool shrinks for that day. Apply a daily capacity override for overtime on one member and the pool reflects the extra hours. There is no separate group calendar to keep in step, because there is nothing separate to keep.

Shared Members Are Real, Not Double Counted

A single flexible machine can belong to more than one group, and the resource calendar shows its capacity in each group it is a member of. This is not double counting; it reflects the genuine fact that one interchangeable machine is available to more than one pool of work.

The scheduler still books the physical machine only once. The resource calendar is a planning lens on availability, showing where a machine could be used, while the scheduling engine ensures it is actually used in only one place at a time. Seeing a shared mill in both the roughing pool and the finishing pool tells a planner the truth about their options without inflating any capacity total.

Reading the Pool

In practice the resource calendar collapses several capacity conversations into one. A plant with three interchangeable mills used to ask, machine by machine, whether the group could take more work. The calendar answers the pooled question directly: here is the group's available hours today, already accounting for each mill's shifts, holidays, and overrides. You read the headroom, decide whether new work fits, and let the scheduler choose which specific mill runs each operation.

For the load side of the same story, the resource load view shows booked hours against available hours; the resource calendar is the supply half, aggregated to the pool.

Where It Fits

The resource calendar belongs with the group management surfaces. You define a pool and its members in the work center groups manager, and you read the pool's capacity here. Together they make a set of interchangeable machines behave like one flexible resource in planning while remaining distinct physical machines in execution. For the whole system these surfaces sit inside, the complete EDGEBIC guide is the map.

The Point of Summing Instead of Storing

Capacity you store is capacity that can lie. A group figure maintained by hand drifts from the machines it is supposed to represent, and a scheduler that trusts it plans against fiction. Summing the members live is the design that makes a pool's capacity always true and always current, at the cost of nothing, because the inputs were already there. That is why the resource calendar can give you a pool's real supply at a glance and never mislead you about it.

Want to see your interchangeable machines pooled into one capacity number? Bring an export to a demo and we will build the group and read its calendar.