How to Create a Department in EDGEBIC

To create a department in EDGEBIC by User Solutions, open the Reports tab, select the Department sub-tab, click Add Department, fill in the name, code, and capacity, tick the work centers that belong to it, and click Save Department. A department groups work centers into one card that shows how many machines it holds, how loaded it is, and whether any of them is a bottleneck. It is an organizing and monitoring layer, not a scheduling constraint. For the concepts behind departments, read customers and departments explained.

Before you start

• At least one work center exists. A department is a grouping of work centers, and an empty one shows nothing useful. See how to set up work centers in EDGEBIC.
• You can see the Reports tab and have permission to add departments. The Add Department button is permission-gated.
• You have decided the code. It must be unique and contain only letters, numbers, dashes, and underscores, no spaces.
• You know the capacity figure for the planning period. It is the total working hours available and becomes the denominator of the utilization percentage.

Steps

1. Open the Reports tab from the main navigation.
2. Select the Department sub-tab. The Department Management and Resource Planning page opens on its Departments tab.
3. Click Add Department at the top right. The Department Details dialog opens.
4. Fill in Basic Information:

5. In the Work Center Assignment section, tick each work center that belongs to this department. The summary row counts them.
6. Click Save Department. The new card appears on the Departments page.

A work center belongs to only one department. Ticking it here moves it out of any department it was previously assigned to when you save.

What changes when you save

The card is a live roll-up of its work centers. The utilization bar is planned hours against the capacity figure you entered, so it is only as accurate as that number. The work-center count, the per-work-center utilization rows, and the bottleneck chips always reflect live work-center data.

How to check it worked

1. Confirm the new card appears on the Departments page and the summary tile row updates its totals.
2. Read the card. The work-center pill should match the number you ticked, and each assigned work center should appear as a row with its own utilization.
3. Open the Capacity Analysis dialog from the page header or the card's view button. The department should appear in the grid with its capacity, planned, and available hours.
4. If the utilization bar reads zero, check the Capacity (hours) value. A blank or stale denominator is the usual cause.

Common mistakes

A space or symbol in the code. The validator rejects anything outside letters, numbers, dashes, and underscores with "Department code can only contain letters, numbers, dashes, and underscores." Use MCH-01 style codes.

Leaving capacity blank or stale. The utilization percentage is meaningless without a current capacity figure for the period. Refresh it on a rhythm.

Expecting status to block scheduling. Setting a department to Maintenance or Inactive is a visual flag. To actually stop production time, add holidays or downtime on each member work center. See how to set up shifts, holidays, and downtime.

Worrying that deleting a department deletes work centers. It does not. Deleting only unassigns them, and they can be ticked into another department later.

Departments are the roll-up view; the resources they group are set up separately. For the wider plant-organization picture, see how to organize departments and plants in EDGEBIC. All the single-task recipes are indexed in the EDGEBIC how-to library, and the EDGEBIC product page shows how capacity roll-ups sit on top of finite capacity scheduling.