Editing a Live Job's Routing in EDGEBIC (Safely)

EDGEBIC by User Solutions lets you edit the routing of a job that is already in production without endangering it, because every scheduled job carries its own frozen copy of the routing, taken the moment it was first scheduled. Engineering can change the standard recipe all week; your live job keeps building from the copy the floor was given. When you do want a live job to change, you change it deliberately, per job, with controls whose blast radius is explicit.

This is the safety model this post walks through: what the frozen copy contains, the three ways to change a live job, what each button actually writes, and the worked numbers that show why the design exists. It assumes you know your way around routings; the flow chart building guide covers that ground.

Why a Frozen Copy Exists at All

Picture the failure mode this design prevents. A job for 100 units is mid-production. Sawing is done; operators are working from printed paperwork. Engineering updates the standard routing: a rate change, a step removed. In a system without isolation, the next reschedule silently re-plans the live job against the new recipe. The paperwork no longer matches the plan. The operator's traveler says one thing, the schedule says another, and nobody decided any of it.

EDGEBIC's answer: at the moment a job is first scheduled, the whole recipe as scheduled is frozen into a private copy. Steps, machines, hours, setup and queue values, parallel and alternative configuration, all of it. Reschedules read the copy. Standard-routing edits touch only future orders and new quote simulations. The floor's reality and the plan cannot drift apart by accident.

Where You Work: the Scheduled Job BOR Tab

Open the Schedule tab, then Scheduled Job BOR. Pick the job in the selector and its own routing loads. You get the same two editors as the standard routing (Data Grid for numbers, Designer for structure), plus, at sites where it is enabled, a read-only Actual Live progress view.

The job Designer adds something the standard Designer does not have: a live header strip showing job progress, actual versus estimated hours, the current step, projected finish, and the due date. You see where the job stands while you decide whether to touch it.

Four header controls define everything that can happen here:

The Three Ways to Change a Live Job

1. Edit just this job's copy

For changes only this job needs (a customer rework step, a one-off machine substitution), edit the copy directly. Add nodes, draw connectors, change hours, exactly as in the standard Designer. Click Update this Job BOR. The standard routing and every other job are untouched.

Two properties make this safe for real production use. First, steps you add to a job's copy are kept when the job is rescheduled; the scheduler recognizes them as part of this job's recipe and places them in their proper spot in the chain. Second, nothing on the Gantt moves when you save: the routing is the recipe, and the plan only changes when you reschedule. Save, review, then reschedule when ready.

2. Adopt the latest standard, via reschedule

For pulling an engineering change into a job: tick Use Global BOR on Reschedule and run a reschedule. The job reads the current standard and refreshes its copy to match. The flag then rests again, so following reschedules lock to that refreshed routing rather than chasing every future standard edit.

3. Reset the copy outright

Reset BOR from Global throws away all per-job customizations and replaces the copy with a fresh snapshot of the standard, immediately. EDGEBIC asks for confirmation with the words "This action cannot be undone," and it means them: there is no automatic version history of the job's copy. The 10-second insurance policy is the grid's Export button, which writes the routing exactly as displayed to Excel before you reset.

The Invariant Underneath All Three: Completed Work Never Moves

Whichever path you take, one rule holds: completed steps are never re-planned. Work that already happened is preserved as-is through every reschedule. If sawing finished Tuesday, no routing edit, no flag, no reset makes the scheduler pretend otherwise. Only remaining work adopts changes.

This is the same actuals-preserving reschedule discipline that handles a machine breakdown mid-job: history is immutable, the future is re-plannable, and the boundary between them is what the floor has actually logged.

The Worked Numbers

Job JOB-2026-0101: Widget-A, 100 units, mid-production, sawing complete. Engineering improves assembly from 0.30 to 0.25 hours per unit and saves the standard routing.

Meanwhile every new order for Widget-A plans assembly at 25.5 hours automatically. The improvement propagates forward on its own; it reaches live work only by decision.

Practices That Keep Live Edits Safe

Match the edit to the blast radius. One-off rework belongs in Update this Job BOR. A permanent process improvement belongs in the standard, then gets adopted per job deliberately. Mixing these up is how a customer-specific step ends up on every future order.

Export before Reset. No undo means no undo. The Excel snapshot costs 10 seconds and preserves the customizations, the markers, and the numbers.

Hover before you edit on the canvas. The job Designer shows the same single-title nodes as the standard one; the tooltip tells you whether you are on a primary step, a parallel copy, a true alternative, or a sub-assembly. Editing the wrong variant is the classic mistake.

Remember the recipe/plan split. Update this Job BOR saves the recipe. The Gantt moves when you reschedule, not before. If you saved and "nothing happened," that is the design working; run the reschedule.

Watch the flag after a surprise. If a job picked up an engineering change you did not expect on reschedule, someone left Use Global BOR on Reschedule ticked. The copy has already refreshed; review the routing and correct what needs correcting.

Untangle sub-assembly additions explicitly. A sub-assembly added to the standard does not appear in a live job until that job opts in. The sub-assembly modeling post walks the scenario.

Troubleshooting

Change Is Constant; Chaos Is Optional

Engineering changes, customer reworks, and rate corrections arrive weekly in any real shop. The question is whether each one lands as a decision or as an accident. Since 1991, User Solutions has built scheduling tools around the decision model, for shops of every size up to the US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, and Cummins, and the frozen-copy design in EDGEBIC is that philosophy made concrete: the standard evolves freely, live jobs change only on purpose, and history never rewrites itself.

See the full EDGEBIC platform, read the visual scheduling pillar for the bigger picture, or bring your gnarliest mid-production change scenario to a demo and walk it through with US.