How to Compare Planned and Actual Hours per Work Center in EDGEBIC

The Plan vs Actual tab of the EDGEBIC by User Solutions utilization report ranks your work centers by the size of the gap between planned hours and logged hours, largest gap first, so the stations whose routings lie to you appear at the top. Every quote, every promise date, and every capacity decision rests on planned hours. This is the report that tells you whether those hours are true.

For the report that holds this tab, see how to run the work center utilization report. Every task in this library is mapped on the EDGEBIC how-to hub.

Before You Start

• Jobs are scheduled, so planned hours exist to compare against.
• Actuals are being logged. Without logged hours and kiosk punches there is no actual side of the comparison, and every station will look like it never ran.
• You have chosen a window long enough to be meaningful. One week of one operator's habits is not a routing finding.

Step 1: Open the Report and Choose a Fair Window

Open Reports, click the 📊 Work Center Utilization tile in the Diagnostics group, then set From and To in the Select date range dialog and click OK.

Choose the window for the question:

Routing decisions belong to the longest window you can get clean actuals for. Short windows measure people and incidents; long windows measure the data.

Step 2: Open Plan vs Actual and Read the Ranking

Switch to the Plan vs Actual tab. Stations are ranked by the size of the gap between planned and actual hours, largest first, so the ranking itself is the finding: the top rows are where your plan and your shop disagree most.

Read the direction of each gap, not only its size:

• Actual above plan. The station takes longer than the routing says. Your promise dates are optimistic and your quotes are underpriced.
• Actual below plan. The station is faster than the routing says. You are holding capacity you do not need, quoting longer lead times than you have to, and probably losing work on price.
• Actual near zero against real planned hours. This is not a speed finding. It is a logging finding.

Click Column Details… in the report window for the authoritative definition, formula and unit of any column, with example values. See how to use Column Details.

Step 3: Separate the Three Causes

A gap has three possible causes and they need different responses.

1. The routing is wrong. Per-unit hours or setup time were estimated once and never revisited. This is the most common cause and the most valuable to fix, because the number flows into scheduling and quoting.
2. The work really varies. Material condition, tooling, or operator experience move the time. The answer is a buffer or a process change, not a different number.
3. The actuals are incomplete. Nobody logged time. The answer is a floor conversation, not a data change.

Rule out the third cause first. Open the 📅 Daily Production report for the same days and look for days that carry planned hours with no actual hours: see how to see daily production totals. Add operator context with the 🌓 Shift Production report when you need to know who was on the station.

Step 4: Drop From the Station to the Step

A station-level gap is the sum of many routing lines, and they are not equally wrong. Open the 🔩 Work Center Progress report, which shows one row per routing step with net hours, actuals, pieces made and percent complete, and filter it to a job that runs on the station in question. See how to run the work center progress report.

Look for lines that are wrong in the same direction across several jobs. One job that overran is an incident. Five jobs that overran on the same operation is a number that needs changing.

Step 5: Take the Comparison Into a Review

Click Export to Excel…. The utilization report produces a multi-sheet workbook, and plan versus actual is one of the sheets alongside the KPIs, per work center detail, the daily heatmap, top jobs by load, capacity waste, and a flat backlog detail. Export to PDF… prints the grid as laid out.

Reports are point-in-time and nothing is cached between opens, so exporting is how a decision keeps its evidence.

A Worked Example

A shop runs the report for the last quarter. Plan vs Actual puts the deburr bench at the top: 610 planned hours against 848 logged, a gap of 238 hours in one quarter. Second on the list is the press, with 420 planned against 305 logged.

Two findings, two different responses.

The deburr bench turns out to be one routing line repeated across a family of parts, where the per-unit hours were set when the parts were smaller. Five jobs show the same overrun on the same operation, so the number is changed, the schedule is re-run, and the quarter after shows a gap of 40 hours instead of 238.

The press is the opposite story. Its actual hours are low because two weeks of night-shift work were never logged, which Daily Production confirms as days with planned hours and no actuals. Nothing on the routing was wrong. The fix was a conversation about punching in, not a data edit, and the next quarter's report shows the press within 30 hours of plan.

The tab produced both findings in the same two minutes. Deciding which was which took the drill-down.

What Changes When You Run It

Nothing. The report reads the database and changes no data. Your grid layout persists per report and per login, so the column arrangement you build for this review is the one you get next month.

How to Check You Read It Right

Take the worst station and confirm the story from a second angle. The 📊 OEE report shows availability, performance and quality for the same station, and a station that is genuinely slow usually shows it in the performance factor as well. See how to run the OEE report. If OEE looks healthy while the gap looks terrible, suspect the routing rather than the machine.

Common Mistakes

• Changing a routing after one job. One data point is an anecdote. Look for the same direction across several jobs before you edit anything.
• Reading an unlogged station as a fast station. Zero actual hours against real planned hours is a logging gap, and it is the most common false finding on this tab.
• Reconciling per-station hours to the job total. Parallel routings log the same clock hours on each parallel machine, so per-station rows can legitimately exceed the job figure.
• Using this tab for a day-level question. It ranks stations across a window. For a specific day, use Daily Production.
• Fixing a variance you should be buffering. If the time genuinely varies, a tighter number just moves the pain.

See how planned hours, logged hours, and the schedule stay in one system on the EDGEBIC product page.