How to Create a Setup Family in EDGEBIC

A setup family in EDGEBIC by User Solutions is a named group of products that change over the same way, so you enter changeover times once per family pair instead of once per product pair. Creating a family takes two fields, a name and a short code. Assigning products to it is a dropdown per product. This walks through both.

Every task in this library is mapped on the EDGEBIC how-to hub. For the wider idea of what changeover time does to a schedule, start with production bottleneck identification.

Before You Start

• The products you want to group already exist. Families point at products, not the other way round.
• You know what actually differs between changeovers on the station in question. A family is a statement about cleanout, tooling, or purge, not about part numbering.
• You have edit rights on work centers and products.

Why Families Exist

Sequence-dependent setup means the time to change over depends on what ran before. White to cream is minutes. Black to white is hours. Recording that pair by pair does not scale: 100 products on one station is 10,000 possible pairs, and a shop with five such stations is at 50,000 cells.

Group those 100 products into eight families and the station needs 64 cells. Five stations need 320. That is a table a process engineer can actually fill in and maintain, which is the whole point.

Step 1: Open the Setup Matrix Area

Open Work Centers and go to the Setup Matrix tab. Family definitions live alongside the matrix because that is where they are used.

Step 2: Add the Family

Click Add Family and fill in two fields.

Click Save. Keep codes short and stable. They appear in exports and act as column keys in grids, so a code that changes every quarter makes historical exports hard to compare. Renaming a code does not break the assignments, but it does confuse anyone reading last month's file.

Repeat for each family. Build the whole set before assigning products, because the assignment dropdown only offers families that already exist.

Step 3: Assign Products to Families

Open the product setup family assignment grid. For each product, pick its family from the dropdown and save.

The rule to hold in mind: a product with no family assigned behaves as its own singleton. The family matrix will never match it, because a family cell needs a family on both sides of the changeover. Only a product-level override cell or the flat setup time on the routing step describes that product's changeovers.

That is acceptable for a genuine one-off. It is not a strategy for a whole catalog.

Step 4: Fill the Matrix

With families defined and products assigned, enter the changeover times per station. Full method for that step is in how to set up sequence dependent setup times.

Two things to remember while filling it in. The matrix is scoped per work center, so a row entered for one paint booth has no effect on a second booth. And the same-family diagonal is not automatically zero: if changing between two products inside the same family really does take no time, enter zero explicitly rather than leaving the cell blank.

Step 5: Handle the Exceptions

When one product pair inside a family behaves differently, do not split the family. Add a product-level override for that single pair, as covered in how to add a product level setup override. The override is checked before the family cell, so it wins for that pair and everything else keeps inheriting.

How to Check It Worked

• The family appears in the assignment dropdown. If it does not, it was not saved.
• The products show the family on their records. Spot-check three, including one you assigned last.
• The matrix accepts a family row. If a family cannot be selected as a from or to value, it does not exist yet.
• A re-run schedule shows the setup time you expect. Schedule two jobs back to back on the same station with products from different families and read the setup on the second job. It should match the matrix cell, not the flat routing value.

Common Mistakes

• Building families around part numbers. Families describe changeover behavior. If two parts need the same cleanout, they belong together no matter how differently they are numbered.
• Too many families. Twenty families give 400 cells and nobody fills them. Start with four or five that map to real cleanout procedures.
• Leaving the diagonal blank and expecting zero. A blank same-family cell falls back to the flat setup time, not to zero.
• Entering the matrix once and expecting it on every station. The matrix is per work center. Two identical booths need two sets of rows.

See how EDGEBIC uses changeover data across a finite capacity plan on the EDGEBIC product page.