How to Run the Work Center Utilization Report in EDGEBIC

The Work Center Utilization report in EDGEBIC by User Solutions is the authoritative capacity view: it lives in the Reports hub under Diagnostics, takes a date range, and builds available hours from the real shift calendars rather than an approximation. When any other screen disagrees with it about capacity, this one wins. Here is how to run it and read the four tabs without guessing.

If what you actually want is the playbook for one oversold day, read reading a red day on the capacity view instead. This page is the report itself, one of many tasks mapped on the EDGEBIC how-to hub.

Before You Start

• Work centers have shifts assigned. Available hours come from those calendars, and a station with no shift reads as having no capacity.
• Instance counts are correct on every work center. A station with three identical machines configured as one instance will read as permanently overloaded.
• Jobs have been scheduled. Load is the hours the plan booked, so an unscheduled plant shows capacity and no load.

Step 1: Open It and Set the Window

Open Reports, then click Work Center Utilization in the Diagnostics group. The date range dialog appears. The default window runs from 30 days back to 60 days forward, which is deliberately wide: it puts recent history and the committed future in one picture.

Narrow it for a specific question. A single week for "why was last week rough", the next four weeks for a capacity meeting, the current quarter for a hiring or shift-pattern conversation.

You can also scope the report to specific jobs by entering job numbers separated by commas in the job filter. One caution: the filter narrows the load, not the capacity. Available hours stay plant-wide, so a job-filtered run shows what those jobs consume of the whole calendar, not their own private utilization percentage.

Step 2: Read the KPI Strip First

Above the tabs sits a plant-level strip: total scheduled hours, total actual hours, total available hours, active work center count, bottleneck count, overloaded count, underloaded count, days in range, and plant utilization percent.

Read three numbers and move on. Plant utilization tells you whether the shop is loaded at all. The overloaded count tells you how many stations to look at. The underloaded count tells you where the spare capacity is hiding, which is the half of the picture most meetings skip.

Step 3: Work the Per Work Center Tab

This is the tab you spend most of your time in. Each row is one station over the whole window.

Each row also carries a plain-English load profile line that states the booked hours against capacity hours and the size of the gap, then names what to check. Read it before you start theorizing, because it is usually right about where to look.

Two columns on this tab are worth more than they look:

• Capacity waste, the available hours the plan never booked at all.
• Idle gap hours, the gaps between different jobs on the same machine, instance and day. This is recoverable time created by sequencing rather than by missing capacity, which makes it the cheapest capacity in the building.

Step 4: Check the Bottleneck Health Column

If a station is flagged as your bottleneck, its bottleneck status column reads one of three values: HEALTHY at 85% and above, AT-RISK between 70 and 85%, and IDLE / STARVED below 70%. The column stays blank for every other station so the eye can scan it.

An idle constraint is worse news than an overloaded general-purpose machine, because everything the plant ships passes through it. If it reads starved, the problem is upstream feeding, not the constraint itself. Flagging and protecting a constraint is covered in how to flag and schedule around a bottleneck.

Step 5: Drill Into a Station's Backlog

Select a work center row and its job backlog appears underneath: every operation booked on that station inside the window, with job number, product, sequence, planned and actual dates, scheduled and actual hours, status, quantity and due date, plus the routing's own timing fields (setup, queue, flow, transit, move, teardown, transfer batch size and transfer delay).

Those routing fields are shown even when they are zero on purpose, so you can see which throughput parameters were never configured. An overload frequently turns out to be queue time nobody revisited rather than a machine that needs replacing.

Step 6: Scan the Other Three Tabs

• Daily Heatmap covers the next 14 days, one cell per station per day, with scheduled hours, that day's capacity, utilization percent and the number of jobs. Days with no capacity are noted as holidays. Full reading method: how to read the capacity heatmap.
• Top Jobs by Load ranks the heaviest jobs across the plant, so you can see whether one order is eating the shop.
• Plan vs Actual ranks stations by the size of the gap between planned and actual hours, largest gap first. Full reading method: how to compare planned and actual hours per work center.

What Changes When You Run It

Nothing. Every report is read-only and queries fresh when opened, so running this during production is safe.

What does change is what you do next: a per-day capacity override, a job moved on the Gantt, or a scheduler run. None of those happen from this report, and none of them touch completed work.

How to Check It Worked

After a fix, re-run the schedule and re-open the report with the same date range. The station's rating should move down a band, its capacity waste should fall if you filled a gap, and the overloaded count in the KPI strip should drop by one. If nothing moved, the change was smaller than the gap, and the load profile line will tell you the size of what remains.

Common Mistakes

• Quoting the approximate report instead. Work Center Performance is fast and ignores shift calendars. It is fine for comparison, not for a capacity decision.
• Reading CRITICAL as physically impossible. Above 100% means booked hours exceed configured capacity. Check the instance count before concluding the machine is overloaded.
• Filtering to jobs and quoting the percentage. The capacity denominator stays plant-wide under a job filter.
• Averaging a range and missing the day. A comfortable month can contain two oversold Tuesdays. Use the heatmap tab for day-level truth.

See how capacity is calculated end to end on the EDGEBIC product page.