How to Lock an Operation in Place on the EDGEBIC Gantt

To lock an operation in place on the EDGEBIC Gantt, right-click its bar and choose Lock Single Operation Segment in Current Position; that segment is protected from being moved while the rest of the board stays editable. The Gantt in EDGEBIC by User Solutions is deliberately permissive, so the lock is the exception you apply on purpose.

This post covers the lock and how it differs from the other three things that hold an operation still. For the general case of a stubborn bar see why a Gantt bar will not move. To place the neighboring bar on a precise timestamp instead of dragging it by eye, see how to move an operation to an exact time. The full task library is at the EDGEBIC how-to hub.

Before You Start

• The job is scheduled, so the operation exists as a bar on the Schedule View Gantt.
• You know why you are locking. A lock is a statement that a human commitment already exists around this segment: a crew rostered, an outside collection booked, a customer told a time.
• You have decided lock rather than pin. If your goal is to influence the next scheduling run rather than to stop a colleague's mouse, the tool is a planned-start pin instead.
• You accept the lock is narrow by design. It covers one operation segment, not the job and not the work center.

The Steps

1. Open the Schedule View tab and find the operation you want to hold.
2. Widen the view if the bar is small. A three-pixel bar is a mis-click waiting to happen, and the right-click menu acts on whatever you actually hit.
3. Right-click the bar to open the operation menu.
4. Choose Lock Single Operation Segment in Current Position. That segment is now protected from being moved.
5. Test it with a small drag. The bar should not take the move. This behavioral check is the confirmation, because a locked segment has no dedicated legend color.
6. Tell whoever shares the board. A lock is invisible until somebody tries to move the bar, so a note in your handover saves a confused minute later.
7. If you also need the engine to respect the position, switch the Drag writes: selector to Planned Start, place the bar, and press Save Changes. See how to change the drag mode on the Gantt.

Four Ways an Operation Holds Still

Confusing these four is the main reason planners think a lock did too little or too much.

Read the table as a ladder of intent. A lock is about people, a pin is about the engine, actuals are about the past, and completion is about the past being final. Choosing the wrong rung produces the two classic complaints: an operation that a run moved anyway, which needed a pin, and an operation nobody can move at all, which was completed rather than locked.

How to Check It Worked

The test is a gentle drag that does not take. There is no separate legend entry for a locked segment: the legend describes operation states such as Default, Overridden, Applied, Rescheduled, Actual Start Applied, Downstream Changed, Planned Applied, and the opaque Completed shade, and a lock is none of those.

If the bar resists but you are not sure the lock is yours, check the alternatives before assuming. The slate lead-time tail at the end of a job is display-only and never movable. A completed operation carries the Completed shade. An operation whose actuals came from an external feed keeps its state whatever you do. And a station can have dragging switched off entirely. All four are laid out in why a Gantt bar will not move.

Common Mistakes

Locking a whole job segment by segment. If the intent is that a job holds together, the reschedule is a better instrument than a wall of locks, because it re-plans around what genuinely cannot move rather than freezing your own ability to adjust. Use the targeted reschedule to tidy a job you have partly placed by hand.

Using a lock where a pin belongs. A lock is protection against a hand on a mouse. If you want a future operation to land on Thursday and stay there through the next run, that is a planned-start pin, saved through the normal staging flow.

Assuming a lock reserves capacity. It does not. Manual placement on this board is never capacity-checked; the model is override and warn, and the engine's next run is what resolves feasibility. Locking a bar over an already-busy hour holds a position that the machine cannot actually deliver.

Locking to stop the queue reshuffling. Dragging one bar can push later operations on the same work center along automatically, which surprises planners who expected one pending change and got several. That is a separate setting, described in auto re-sequencing after a Gantt drag.

Locking instead of protecting the near horizon. If the real requirement is that today's printed schedule stops changing under the shop floor, that is a scheduling-scope decision rather than a per-bar one. How to keep today's schedule from changing is the better read.

Forgetting the lock exists. Because nothing on the bar advertises it, a lock you set in March is a mystery in June. Keep locks few and recent.

Next Steps

The lock rarely travels alone. Most planners set one, place a neighboring operation precisely, then let the engine reflow what remains. For the precise placement, the Gantt right-click operation menu covers the exact-move entry and the cleanup family alongside the lock. If the commitment you are protecting is a bottleneck operation with a target date, an anchor is the stronger and more explicit instruction, covered in how to anchor a job to a target start date.

The takeaway

Lock against hands, pin against the engine, and let completion speak for the past. Held that way the four mechanisms stop competing and start dividing the work cleanly, and a locked segment becomes what it should be: a small, deliberate, well-known exception on a board that is otherwise free to be re-planned. See the scheduler board in context on the EDGEBIC product page, and if you are stepping up from the earlier User Solutions planning tools, the move from RMDB to EDGEBIC sets out what carries across. Next, read why a Gantt bar will not move and how to change the drag mode on the Gantt.