How to Set Daily Working Hours and Breaks in EDGEBIC

Daily working hours live on the Shift Configuration dialog: each weekday has its own working-day checkbox and its own Start and End times. Tick the days the shift runs, type the times, and the row shows you the computed duration as you go. Breaks are handled differently: they are not a field on the shift, and there are three correct ways to model one.

This is the field-level detail behind every capacity number in the plant. Get the hours wrong here and every promise date is wrong by the same proportion. For the layered calendar model these hours sit inside, read shifts and calendars explained from EDGEBIC by User Solutions.

Before You Start

• You know the real working pattern, including the days the shift does not run.
• You know what happens at break time: does work genuinely stop, or does the machine keep running through a staggered lunch?
• You know whether any work center is on a custom calendar. Those do not receive global shift edits.
• You can rerun the schedule afterward.

Step 1: Open the Shift for Editing

Open the Daily Hours tab, select the inner Shift tab, and click the pencil icon (tooltip Edit) in the Actions column of the shift's row. The Shift Configuration dialog opens with the heading Edit Shift.

For a brand-new shift, click Add Shift instead and start from an empty card. That path is covered in how to add a second shift.

Step 2: Tick the Days the Shift Runs

In the Daily Working Hours section, every day of the week has its own checkbox. Tick the days the shift actually runs. An unticked day contributes zero hours to capacity, which is exactly what you want for a plant that does not run weekends.

Do not tick Saturday just because someone works the occasional Saturday. Weekend production is off by default for work centers, and an occasional Saturday belongs in a per-day capacity override, not in the weekly pattern. See how to add a Saturday shift for one week.

Step 3: Set Start and End Per Day

For each ticked day, enter Start: and End:. The row shows the computed duration (⏱) as you type. Read that number: it is the fastest way to catch a typo before it becomes a scheduling error.

Days do not have to match each other. This is a legitimate and common pattern:

That is a 46-hour week on a four-and-a-half-day pattern, and the scheduler will fill Friday afternoon with nothing.

Reset All Days clears every day back to 00:00 if the card has become a mess and you want to rebuild it.

Step 4: Handle the Break

Breaks are not a field on the shift. Pick one of three approaches:

Option A: enter hours net of the break. A crew on site 08:00 to 17:00 with an unpaid hour at noon is entered as 08:00 to 16:00. Simplest, gives the correct 8 hours, documents nothing about why.

Option B: a recurring partial plant holiday. Enter the shift as 08:00 to 17:00 and add a partial plant holiday for the break window. The scheduler subtracts only the overlap from each affected shift, and the holiday record names the reason. See how to schedule a half-day holiday for the partial-holiday dialog and the overlap arithmetic.

Option C: two shifts. If no job may span the break (a hard split, not just an unstaffed hour), define two shifts instead: Morning 08:00 to 12:00 and Afternoon 13:00 to 16:00. This is the only option that physically prevents an operation from running across the gap.

Most plants should use Option A or B. Reserve Option C for a genuine hard split.

Step 5: Save

Click Save Shift (💾). The grid updates with the new Total Hours for the week.

What Changes When You Save

A worked example of the effect: a 20-hour job on a one-instance mill running 8 hours a day finishes Wednesday at noon. Change End: to 18:00 (10 hours a day), rerun, and the same job finishes Tuesday at 18:00. Nothing changed except the calendar.

How to Check It Worked

1. Read the Total Hours column on the Shift Management grid. It should match the sum of your day durations.
2. Open the Resource Calendar and read one work center's capacity on a day whose hours you changed. A one-instance machine should show exactly the day's shift hours.
3. Run Drive Schedule and compare a known job's finish date against the previous run.
4. If one machine did not change, check its Shift Calendar badge before assuming the edit failed.

Common Mistakes

Shrinking a shift to absorb occasional losses. Cutting an 8-hour shift to 7 because the plant "usually loses about an hour" removes that hour from every day of every week forever, including the days it was never lost. Model real losses as downtime, partial holidays, or per-day overrides so the record explains itself.

Overlapping start and end times between two shifts. Ending one at 16:30 while the next starts at 16:00 double-counts 30 minutes of clock on every working day. The durations on the cards will not warn you, because each card is correct in isolation.

Editing a shift to fix one machine. A global shift edit reaches every work center using it. If only one machine needs different hours, give it its own calendar instead (how to give one work center its own calendar).

Expecting the plan to update itself. Saving a shift changes available capacity, never the existing plan. This appears often enough to lead our list of shift and calendar mistakes.

Next

Honest hours are the foundation of every date the scheduler produces. Enter what the crew actually works, model breaks one consistent way, and rerun before you promise anything. More single-task recipes are in the EDGEBIC how-to hub, and the platform overview is at /edgebic.