The EDGEBIC Shop Floor Kiosk Explained: Where Actuals Come From

EDGEBIC by User Solutions ships a dedicated shop floor kiosk, an operator terminal that lets a worker start and finish operations and log hours and pieces directly against the same database the planner uses, so the schedule learns what actually happened at the machine. A schedule is only a forecast until reality is fed back into it. The kiosk is how that feedback happens: instead of hours being reconstructed the next morning, they are captured at the point and moment of work, and they land in the same place the plan lives.

This is the entry point for the whole actuals pipeline. Everything downstream, the plan-versus-actual baselines, the earned value costs, the OEE quality factor, depends on data that starts as an operator's action at the kiosk.

One Database, No Sync

The design decision that matters most is that the kiosk is not a separate island. It runs as its own application on the floor, but it writes to the same database as the main scheduling program. There is no nightly export, no reconciliation step, no second copy of the truth to drift.

The practical payoff is correctness on reschedule. Because a punch at the machine and a schedule change by the planner land in the same store, EDGEBIC can preserve completed work when it re-runs: an operation the floor already finished is treated as historical fact and left alone, while only the remaining work is replanned. A two-system setup that had to sync could never do that reliably, because it could never be sure which copy was right.

What an Operator Records

The kiosk is deliberately spare, because logging that is slow is logging that does not happen. An operator can start an operation, which stamps its actual start time, and finish it, which stamps its actual end. Between those, they record what they produced as hours or as pieces.

Piece counts can be split into good, scrap, and rework. That split is not bureaucratic detail; it is the raw material for the quality factor in OEE, which is good pieces over good plus scrap plus rework. Without those numbers, EDGEBIC honestly reports quality as not available rather than inventing a perfect score. For how the hours and pieces flow into the plan, see how to log actual hours and pieces.

Why Log at the Machine

There are two arguments for capturing actuals at the kiosk rather than through a supervisor's morning data-entry session, and both come down to truth.

The first is timing. An actual logged when work starts and stops carries the real clock. A figure entered from memory the next day is an estimate, and the schedule has no way to know it is an estimate, so it trusts it completely. Garbage timing in, confident wrong schedule out.

The second is coverage. When logging is a separate administrative chore, it slips, and the slip is expensive because so much of the reporting depends on it. The actual-cost columns of earned value, the daily production numbers, and OEE all read from logged data. A kiosk that makes logging a two-tap moment in the operator's flow keeps that data flowing, and the reports that were blank fill in.

From Open Loop to Closed Loop

The larger point is what the kiosk does to the system as a whole. Without it, scheduling is an open loop: the planner makes a forecast, the floor does the work, and the two never quite reconnect. Completed jobs get replanned, percent-complete figures are guesses, and answering a customer means an educated estimate.

With the kiosk, the loop closes. Completed operations are preserved, percent-complete is real, and a customer question is answered with logged fact. The change at the machine is small, a start action, a finish action, a count, but the change to the plan is the difference between a schedule people confirm and one they merely hope is right.

Where It Fits

The kiosk sits at the front of the actuals story and the reports sit at the back. Operators log at the terminal; the schedule absorbs the actuals and preserves completed work; the dashboard and reports read the result. A shop that logs well in week one finds the second half of the report catalog working immediately, because those reports were always waiting for exactly this data.

For the whole system the kiosk feeds, the complete EDGEBIC guide is the map.

The Point of a Terminal at the Machine

You cannot manage a plant from a plan nobody confirms. The kiosk exists to make confirmation the path of least resistance: a fast terminal, a couple of taps, in the operator's own workflow. Do that, and the schedule stops being a forecast and starts being a record, which is the point at which finite capacity planning becomes trustworthy instead of aspirational.

Want to see how logged actuals change what your schedule knows? Bring an export to a demo and we will walk the loop from kiosk to report.