EDGEBIC Units of Measure Explained: The Unit That Also Tells the Scheduler How to Count

EDGEBIC by User Solutions treats a unit of measure as master data with its own record, not as free text typed onto a product. Each unit carries a full name, a short symbol, a category, an active flag, and a scheduling behavior. Products point at that record, so EA means the same thing on the product list, the sales order, the inventory ledger, and the kiosk.

That sounds like housekeeping. It is, and housekeeping is exactly where quantity errors are prevented, because a quantity is meaningless until you know what it counts.

What a Unit Record Holds

The split between Name and Symbol is the one that earns its keep daily. Grids and bars have limited room, so the symbol is what a planner reads on the work center schedule and in a product list, while the full name is what removes ambiguity when someone is setting a product up for the first time. Keeping both means you never have to choose between a screen that fits and a screen that is clear.

Category does no arithmetic. It groups the list so that a long unit list stays navigable and so that an obviously wrong pick, a mass unit on a counted item, stands out while you are choosing.

Active is the field people forget and then wish they had used. Units accumulate over years, often from imports. Deactivating an obsolete unit takes it out of every picker while every historical product and transaction that used it keeps its record intact. That is almost always the right move over deleting, for the same reason it is the right move for products you no longer make.

The Scheduling Behavior Flag

The field that makes this more than a lookup table is scheduling behavior, which marks a unit as belonging to hours-based or pieces-based work.

EDGEBIC can schedule a work center two ways. The usual way is by time: the routing states hours per unit, and the scheduler books hours against the calendar. The other way is by output: the work center states a rate, and the scheduler works out how long a quantity takes from that rate. Which mode a work center uses is set on the work center, and the trade-offs are covered in pieces versus hours capacity.

The unit's scheduling behavior is the master data half of that picture. An item counted in eaches on a line that is genuinely rated in pieces per hour belongs to the pieces world. An item measured in square meters through a process rated by run time belongs to the hours world. Recording that on the unit keeps the intent explicit and in one place, instead of being something a planner infers from a work center setting three screens away.

It does not override the work center. A work center's capacity type still decides how that work center schedules. What the flag does is make an inconsistency visible in master data, and inconsistency between how you count an item and how you time its work is one of the more expensive quiet mismatches in a scheduling model.

Why There Is No Unit Conversion

EDGEBIC does not convert between units. A product carries one unit, and every quantity attached to that product, on manufacturing orders, on routing steps, in the inventory ledger, on sales orders, is in that unit.

This is a deliberate simplification, and it is the right one for a scheduling system. A conversion table is a second source of truth about quantity, and the moment two of them disagree, every number downstream becomes negotiable. A scheduler that has to ask which unit a quantity is in before it can plan is a scheduler that will eventually plan the wrong amount.

Two consequences follow.

Conversion happens on import. When your ERP sends quantities in a different unit than you plan in, the conversion is applied once, in the import mask, where the mapping is written down and reviewable. That is also where you normalize spelling variants, which is a much more common problem than genuine conversion: EA, EACH, ea, and Each are one unit with four spellings, and mapping them onto one record is a mask's job, not a reason to create four units.

A real conversion is usually two products. Buying in pounds and selling in pieces is not a unit conversion, it is a material relationship, and the honest model is a purchased product measured in pounds appearing in the routing as a material step, producing a separate product measured in each. That model survives yield loss, scrap, and partial batches; a conversion factor does not.

Setting the List Up

The practical approach is a short list, defined early.

Build the units you actually plan in, not every unit anyone in the business uses. Pick one as the default so new products start somewhere sensible rather than unset. Give each one a symbol that will still be readable in a narrow grid column. Then leave it alone: a unit list that grows during an implementation usually means the import mapping is doing too little.

Products then pick from the list. The product record shows the unit alongside price, cost, lead time, and category, and the unit symbol travels with the product into every screen that shows a quantity. The product master setup guide covers where the field sits, and how to add a unit of measure covers creating one.

Where It Fits

Units of measure sit at the base of the data model, under products, and every quantity in EDGEBIC inherits their meaning: the quantity on a job, the pieces logged at a kiosk, the balance in the inventory projection, the line quantity on a sales order. Get them defined once and consistently, and none of those numbers ever need a footnote.

The complete EDGEBIC guide shows how the master data layers stack, and /edgebic covers the platform as a whole.

The Small Field That Prevents Big Errors

Nobody has ever been excited about a unit of measure list. But almost every plant has a story about a quantity that was read in the wrong unit, and the cost of that story is usually a run of scrapped parts or a shipment short by an order of magnitude. Making the unit a real record, with one spelling, one symbol, and one meaning, is how you make sure the number on the screen and the number in someone's head are counting the same thing.