The Earned Value report in EDGEBIC by User Solutions is in the Reports hub under Executive / KPI: it takes a date range and returns every active job with its planned, earned and actual hours, its SPI and CPI, and a forecast of where its hours will land. It answers a question no other report does, which is not "is this job late" but "is this job efficient, and will it finish on plan".
Late Jobs and On-Time Delivery cover the dates. How the three fit together is in the reports that answer "are we on time?". Every task in this library is mapped on the EDGEBIC how-to hub.
Before You Start
- Actual hours are being logged. Earned value compares plan against reality, and without logged hours there is no reality half.
- Jobs are scheduled. Planned hours come from the schedule, not from the routing estimate.
- Work center hourly rates are set if you want currency columns. They appear automatically once rates exist.
Step 1: Open It and Set the Cut-Off
Open Reports and click Earned Value in the Executive / KPI group. Set From and To, then OK. The To date acts as the cut-off: planned hours to date means planned up to that point.
A weekly review usually wants the last seven days. A project post-mortem wants the whole life of the job. Keep the window consistent between runs, because most of the value in this report comes from watching an index move.
Step 2: Learn the Column Set Once
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| BAC h | Total planned hours for the job |
| PV h | Planned hours up to the cut-off |
| EV h | Earned hours, the plan multiplied by percent done |
| AC h | Actual hours logged |
| % Done | Completion of the job |
| SPI | Earned divided by planned to date |
| CPI | Earned divided by actual |
| EAC h | Forecast total hours at completion |
| VAC h | Forecast variance against the budget, negative meaning over |
The grid arrives sorted worst SPI first, so triage starts at row one.
Step 3: Read SPI and CPI Together
Neither index means much alone. Read the pair.
| SPI | CPI | What it is telling you |
|---|---|---|
| Below 1 | Below 1 | Behind and inefficient. The most serious combination. |
| Below 1 | 1 or above | Behind but efficient. Short of capacity or time, not of skill. |
| 1 or above | Below 1 | On plan but burning more hours than it earns. |
| 1 or above | 1 or above | On track. |
That two-by-two is the whole diagnostic. A shop that reads it correctly stops sending supervisors to fix jobs whose only problem is that another job is sitting in front of them on a machine.
Step 4: Use EAC to Forecast the Landing Point
EAC forecasts the hours the job will consume in total, projecting the efficiency measured so far across the work still remaining. Compare it against BAC, the budget.
A job with a BAC of 180 hours and an EAC of 214 is forecast to overrun by 34 hours, and VAC states that gap directly. The value of the forecast is that it arrives while the job is still running: 34 hours found at 40% complete can be recovered, and the same 34 found at delivery is a post-mortem.
Step 5: Drill From a Bad Row
Two drills answer most earned value questions:
- Work Center Progress, filtered to the job, shows which specific operation is consuming the hours. Method in how to check a job's progress.
- Work Center Utilization, for the station those operations sit on. A low SPI with a healthy CPI almost always resolves to a station above 100% for the window.
Step 6: Export for the Review
Click Export to Excel. If the currency columns matter and are hidden, unhide them with the column chooser before exporting, because hidden columns are not written to the file. Full mechanics are in how to export a report to Excel.
What Changes When You Run It
Nothing. The report is read-only and queries fresh each time.
The decisions it drives change things: resequencing a station, adding capacity for a day, moving an operation to an alternate work center, or re-running the scheduler. Completed work stays exactly where it was logged through any of those, so a reschedule never rewrites the earned hours you are looking at.
How to Check It Worked
Re-run the same window a week after acting and read the same row. SPI rising toward 1.0 means the job is catching up on schedule. CPI holding steady while SPI rises is the healthy pattern: it means you gave the job capacity rather than pressure. EAC falling toward BAC means the forecast overrun is being recovered.
If the indexes barely move but percent done jumped, check that the window covers the period the work happened in.
Common Mistakes
- Treating SPI of exactly 1.00 as good news. With nothing planned to be done yet, the index defaults to 1.00. Read percent done on the same row before believing it.
- Reading one index alone. Behind-but-efficient and on-plan-but-overspending need opposite responses, and only the pair distinguishes them.
- Trusting the report on an unlogged shop. Earned value is only as good as the actuals feeding it.
- Exporting with hidden columns. Anything hidden in the grid is absent from the file.
See how the plan behind these hours is built on the EDGEBIC product page.
Expert Q&A: Deep Dive
Q: A job reads SPI 0.72 and CPI 1.10. What is actually wrong with it?
A: Nothing is wrong with the work; something is wrong with the capacity it is getting. CPI above 1.0 says the hours being spent are earning more than they cost, so the crew is efficient. SPI at 0.72 says only about three quarters of the hours the plan expected by now have been earned, so the job is simply not getting enough time on the machines. Look at the stations its remaining operations are queued on rather than at the crew: the Work Center Utilization report will usually show one of them above 100% for the window, with this job sitting behind two others. The fix is sequence or capacity, not supervision, and pushing the crew harder on an efficient job wastes the one thing that is going right.
Q: Every job on the report shows SPI near 1.00 and I do not believe it. What is going on?
A: Check whether actuals are being logged at all, because an unlogged shop produces optimistic-looking earned value. The indexes compare earned hours against planned and actual hours, and with no logged hours there is nothing to be behind on, so the numbers cluster harmlessly around 1.0. A related case is a job that has not started yet: with nothing planned to be done so far, SPI defaults to 1.00, which reads as on schedule and actually means nothing to compare yet. Check percent done on the same row before trusting any index near 1.0, and if the whole column looks that way, the finding is a logging discipline finding rather than a scheduling one.
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