How to Organize Departments and Multiple Plants in EDGEBIC

To set up multi-plant department scheduling in EDGEBIC by User Solutions, you create one department per site, assign that site's work centers to it, and put transit days on the routing steps that cross sites. There is no separate multi-site module to license and no second installation to keep in sync. The department is a grouping and a capacity roll-up; the transit days are what the engine actually reads.

This guide covers the setup mechanics. For what departments are and are not, read customers, departments and units of measure explained.

Before you start

You need at least one work center. A department is a grouping of work centers, so an empty one shows nothing useful. Adding departments is permission-gated, so if the add button is missing, your role does not have it yet.

Step 1: Open the departments screen

Open the Reports tab and select the Department sub-tab. The Department Management and Resource Planning page opens on its Departments tab: a row of summary tiles across the top (total departments, active, work centers, average utilization, bottlenecks) and one card per department below.

Departments sit under Reports rather than in the main navigation on purpose. They are a monitoring surface first and master data second. An Analytics tab beside the cards holds two charts over the same data: department utilization, and planned versus remaining capacity stacked per department.

Step 2: Add a department

Click ➕ Add Department. The Department Details dialog opens with two sections.

Basic Information:

The code validator rejects anything outside letters, digits, dashes, and underscores, so MCH HOU with a space fails and MCH-HOU passes. Codes must also be unique.

Work Center Assignment: tick each work center that belongs to this department. The summary row counts them. Untick to remove. Remember that a work center belongs to one department at a time, so ticking it here moves it out of any department it was in when you save.

Click 💾 Save Department. The card appears on the page.

Step 3: Set capacity honestly, and refresh it

The capacity hours field is the denominator of everything the card shows. A sensible way to derive it per planning period:

Capacity = instances × shift hours per day × working days in the period

Three work centers at eight hours a day across twenty-five working days gives 600 hours for the month.

The important caveat: both this capacity figure and the planned hours it divides into are planner-maintained planning numbers. They are not recalculated automatically when a job is scheduled or completed. A stale denominator makes every percentage on the page wrong, and a utilization bar reading zero on a busy floor almost always means nobody has maintained the numbers for the current period.

Set a rhythm. Update capacity and planned hours when you plan each period, the same way you would refresh any rough-cut capacity figure. Between refreshes, read the live parts of the card instead: the work center count, the per-work-center utilization rows, and the bottleneck chips are all current at all times.

Step 4: Read the card

Each card summarizes its members:

The bottleneck chips are the highest-value part of the card. They point straight at the constraint that governs everything downstream, which is where any bottleneck analysis starts.

Step 5: Understand what status does and does not do

Click the status pill to switch between Active, Maintenance, and Inactive.

None of these stop the scheduler. Status is informational, and the engine keeps booking work centers inside a department set to Maintenance exactly as before. To actually block time you reduce capacity on each affected work center.

The two-step for a genuine shutdown is worth writing on a card and taping to a monitor:

1. Set the department status so humans see it.
2. Zero or reduce each affected work center with per-day capacity overrides so the engine sees it.

Skip the second and the schedule keeps promising work on a line that is torn down. Skip the first and the schedule is right but nobody knows why the floor is quiet.

Step 6: Run the capacity analysis

Click 📊 Capacity Analysis in the page header, or the view button on any card. The dialog shows utilization and available capacity across all tracked departments:

• A grid with department, code, work centers, capacity hours, planned hours, available hours, and utilization, plus a totals row.
• A summary panel with total capacity, total planned, total available, and average utilization.
• Refresh and export buttons.

That export is the artifact to bring to a planning meeting. The deep dive on how those numbers are composed is in department capacity analysis.

Step 7: Model a second plant

The multi-plant pattern is one department per site, or per major area per site.

1. Create a department per site. For example MCH-HOU "Machining Houston" with location Houston, TX, and HT-MX "Heat Treat Monterrey" with location Monterrey, MX. The location field doubles as the ship-from address.
2. Assign each site's work centers to its department. Work centers keep their own shifts and holidays, so each plant runs its own calendar. A Mexican plant observes Mexican public holidays and a US plant observes US ones, inside the same schedule.
3. Enter transit days on cross-site routing steps. On any step where work moves between sites, put the shipping time in the step's transit days. The engine adds that travel before the next plant's operation can begin.
4. Use the cards and the capacity analysis as your per-plant load view.

Worked example. Widget-A is milled in Houston, heat-treated in Monterrey, and inspected back in Houston. The step routed to the Monterrey furnace carries four transit days. The engine finishes the Houston milling, waits four days of transit, books the furnace, then adds the return transit before inspection. The department page shows Houston and Monterrey as separate cards with their own utilization figures.

A three-department network looks like this:

Total network capacity is 1,000 hours, and the summary tiles roll that up automatically.

Step 8: Edit and delete safely

Editing is the pencil button on the card: change fields or retick the work center checklist, then save. Deleting is the trash button, and the confirmation is explicit that it unassigns all work centers from the department.

Deleting a department never deletes work centers. They become unassigned, keep their shifts and capacity and bookings, and can be ticked into another department later. That is why departments are the safest master data in the application to reorganize. Nothing about a job depends on them.

A short worked sequence

A single plant organized into three areas:

1. Add Machining / MCH-01 / Production, capacity 480, with Saw-1, CNC-Mill-1 and CNC-Mill-2 ticked.
2. Add Fabrication / FAB-01 / Production, capacity 320, with Weld-1 and Paint-Booth-1.
3. Add Assembly / ASM-01 / Assembly, capacity 160, with Assembly-1.
4. The summary tiles read three departments, six work centers, and one bottleneck because CNC-Mill-1 carries the flag.
5. Before a paint line shutdown, set the Fabrication card to Maintenance for visibility, and separately add a holiday on Paint-Booth-1 so the scheduler actually skips those days.

For the mistakes that make these numbers lie, see customer and department setup mistakes. For the full first-run sequence on a new plant, the greenfield walkthrough covers departments in context, and the complete EDGEBIC guide and product hub map the rest of the platform.