Fourth Shift to EDGEBIC: The Data Mapping Reference

Mapping Fourth Shift data into EDGEBIC means exporting items, work centers, routings, and open orders from the ERP, then mapping each column once into a saved import mask that runs in two clicks every week afterwards. Nothing is installed inside Fourth Shift and nothing queries its database unless you want it to. The file is the interface, which is exactly the property a long-lived ERP install should want.

EDGEBIC by User Solutions is the current generation of the scheduling line whose Fourth Shift integration is the best-documented in the family: at Plastilite Corporation, the Fourth Shift vendor recommended the User Solutions scheduler to its own customer, and the integration ran Monday to Friday. That story is told in the complete Fourth Shift integration guide. This post is the field-level reference behind it.

The load order, and why it is the order

Auto-create is on by default, so a routing file that names an unknown work center creates one rather than failing. Treat that as a net, not a plan: an auto-created work center has a name and nothing else, which means one machine, no calendar, and no efficiency. Load the real work center file first and the routing import finds everything it needs.

Two entity types are not exported from anywhere. Shift carries your working calendar (one row per shift with a start and end pair per weekday, and a blank pair meaning that day is off). PlantHoliday carries plant-wide closures by name and date. Both are written in a plain spreadsheet, and both are worth doing carefully, because every date the scheduler produces is planned against them.

Items to Product

Only the item number is required. A narrow first file (id plus description) is a perfectly good starting point, and a later refresh file adds costs or lead times without disturbing anything already set.

Work centers

This file decides whether the schedule is believable, because it carries capacity.

Older ERPs usually model a work center as a single capacity figure rather than a count of machines, so Number_Of_Instances is the column most likely to be missing from the export and most likely to matter. Fill it by hand for every center that is really a cell of several identical machines. A four-press cell imported as one instance produces a plan roughly four times too long, and nothing errors to tell you: the dates are simply wrong. That failure mode is the practical argument in finite versus infinite capacity scheduling.

Routings

The Alt_Type column is the one that carries a legacy shop's real flexibility. Alternative means the step can run on this machine instead of the parent's, which is how a press family or a set of interchangeable lathes gets expressed. Parallel-Dependent means the partner machine runs in lockstep with the parent, which is how synchronized multi-machine operations are modeled.

How the sequence gets wired

Routing rows cannot be written one at a time, because step 10 has to point at step 20 and step 20 does not exist yet. The import therefore runs in two passes. Pass one validates every row, resolves or creates the items and work centers it names, and buffers the row. Pass two groups the buffer by end product, sorts by sequence number, writes the steps, and wires the chain: 10 to 20, 20 to 30, and the last step to the finished item so the routing renders as one connected flow in the graphical designer.

Check that visually after the first routing import. A routing whose final link is missing draws as a chain of operations floating free of the item it builds, and it is the single most common first-import cosmetic defect.

Open orders and actuals

Orders need product, quantity, and a job date. An order reference column groups multi-line orders together, with jobs auto-numbered {Ref}-{line}. Due date, order date, customer, priority, and price are optional, and missing customers are created automatically.

Actuals need job number, work center id, and the date, plus hours or pieces (either one can be derived from the other using the operation's rate). They import last because every row has to find an operation on a job that is already scheduled. The import always overwrites the days the file carries, so re-running a corrected extract fixes numbers instead of doubling them, and days the file does not mention stay as they are unless you explicitly ask for them to be cleared.

Legacy export handling

This is where a Fourth Shift mapping differs most from a modern ERP export, and the mask has a switch for each case.

Positional mapping deserves the emphasis. Scheduled extracts from older systems frequently produce raw delimited output with no headings, and mapping by column number handles it permanently. The mask remembers the positions, so the weekly routine is unchanged from a headed file.

Re-import behavior, in three rules

• Master data is safe by default. Existing items and work centers come back Reused and untouched unless you deliberately enable updates for a refresh run.
• Blank preserves, zero writes. On an update, a blank cell keeps the existing value. A column full of zeros writes zeros, so leave a column out of the file rather than filling it with numbers you do not mean.
• Routing re-import wipes and recreates that item's steps once per run, on first reference. All of one item's steps must therefore travel in the same file. This is what keeps re-imports idempotent, and it is safe for running jobs: every scheduled job carries a frozen snapshot of the routing it was planned with, and completed work is never moved by any reschedule.

What no export can carry

The settings that most change the schedule have no ERP column: the sequence-dependent setup matrix, work center groups and their selection strategies, operator skills, bottleneck anchoring, and lot streaming transfer batches. Those are configured once in EDGEBIC and then apply to every job that arrives afterwards. The EDGEBIC product overview maps the engine, and the ERP integration architecture shows why one mask design serves every ERP in the same way.

For what the week looks like once the masks exist, read the daily Fourth Shift and EDGEBIC scheduling workflow. For the questions shops ask first, see the Fourth Shift integration FAQ.