How Setup Phases Become Setup Variance in EDGEBIC

In EDGEBIC by User Solutions, a changeover is captured phase by phase at the kiosk, and those timed phase punches build a setup-variance figure against the routing's standard. Instead of recording setup as a single lump, the kiosk walks the operator through teardown, fixture, tools, first article, QA hold, and run-off, timing each one separately. Compared against the setup standard the routing carries, the summed actual gives you a variance, and the phase breakdown tells you exactly where the time went. This is the granular end of shop floor data collection, and it is what makes setup reduction a data-driven effort rather than a guess.

Setup is often the hidden thief of capacity. A lumped setup number tells you it was slow; a phase breakdown tells you why, which is the difference between knowing you have a problem and knowing where to fix it.

The Setup Ribbon and Its Phases

When an operator taps Start Setup, the kiosk opens a setup ribbon on its first phase and starts an elapsed-on-this-phase clock. The advance button always names the next phase, so the operator just taps through the changeover as fast or as slow as it really goes.

Each phase is its own punch with its own clock. Tapping the advance button closes the current phase and opens the next. On the last phase the advance button reads Start Run: tapping it closes the final setup phase, opens the run punch, and, if no one has recorded it yet, stamps the operation's actual start. Setup ends exactly where production begins.

Where the Standard Comes From

The routing step carries a setup standard, the time the process is expected to take. EDGEBIC snapshots that standard onto each setup punch at the moment the punch opens. Freezing it at open time matters: if a process engineer later edits the routing's setup time, punches already recorded keep the standard they were captured against, so historical variance stays accurate. The same freeze-at-open discipline governs the piece rate, and it is why past records do not silently shift when a routing changes.

The setup punch also remembers what product ran before it on that machine, which feeds the sequence-dependent setup picture: changing from a light color to a dark one is quick, the reverse is slow, and knowing the from-product is what lets that story be told.

From Phases to Variance

Setup variance is the difference between the actual setup time and the standard. The actual is the sum of the phase punch durations. The standard is the snapshot on the punches. Subtract one from the other and you have the variance, with the phase breakdown attached.

Take a paint booth switching from white to black. The routing allows 0.75 hours of setup. The operator taps through four phases:

The total actual setup is 1.33 hours against a 0.75-hour standard, a variance of plus 0.58 hours. The breakdown is the payoff: teardown alone at 0.33 hours consumed a large share of what the standard allowed for the entire changeover. That points a kaizen effort straight at teardown, rather than at a lumped number that says only that setup ran long.

Setup Stays Out of Production Hours

A crucial rule keeps this clean. Setup, teardown, and idle time are recorded faithfully on their own punches, but they never roll up into the operation's productive hours. Only run and rework time counts as production hours. So a long changeover shows up in setup-variance reporting, where you can act on it, without inflating the operation's efficiency on the run itself. Nobody's run efficiency is judged on a slow fixture change, and the setup problem is not hidden inside a blended figure. For the wider rule about which states count as production hours, see how the kiosk captures a production punch.

This separation is also why the setup phases matter as their own OEE and analysis bucket. Setup loss is a distinct category from availability loss and quality loss, and treating it separately is what lets a plant target it directly.

Why the Six Taps Are Worth It

The temptation on a busy floor is to skip the phases and tap straight to Start Run to save keystrokes. That saves six taps and loses the entire point. Skip the phases and you still get a setup duration, but you cannot see whether the time went into teardown, fixturing, tooling, or waiting on QA. When you later set out to cut setup, a lumped number leaves you guessing while the phase breakdown hands you the answer.

Six honest taps per changeover is the whole cost of that answer. For a shop chasing changeover reduction, or one whose bottleneck is starved by long setups, that is one of the cheapest pieces of data it can collect, and one of the most valuable. It is the same reason the platform captures live punches rather than end-of-shift totals: the detail cannot be reconstructed from memory, only recorded as it happens.

Where It Feeds

Setup variance is not a dead-end report. The phase breakdown feeds setup-variance analysis, the from-product data feeds sequence-dependent setup planning, and the clean separation of setup from run keeps the productive-hours figures honest for the schedule and the earned-value reports. A shop that shrinks its setups sees the effect ripple into capacity: less time lost to changeover means more time producing, which is exactly the kind of gain that took a User Solutions customer like GE Railcar from 30% to 90% on-time delivery by attacking the real constraints rather than guessing at them.

Setup detail also lands on the shift handoff, so the oncoming crew inherits a clear picture of setup, run, and down hours for the shift. That closes the loop from the individual phase tap to the plant-level view.

The Bottom Line

Setup phases turn a changeover into data. The kiosk times teardown, fixture, tools, first article, QA hold, and run-off separately, snapshots the routing standard onto each punch, and produces a setup-variance figure with the phase breakdown attached. Setup stays out of production hours, so a slow changeover shows up where you can act on it without distorting run efficiency. The six taps per setup are the small price of knowing not just that setup ran long, but exactly where. See how the phases fit the whole capture loop in the shop floor execution guide, and explore the platform at EDGEBIC.