How to Set Queue, Flow, and Transit Times on an EDGEBIC Routing

Queue time, transit days, and transfer delay are all fields on an individual routing step in EDGEBIC by User Solutions, and you set them on the step that produces the wait. There is no global buffer setting, no per-product default to override, and nothing to restart. Save the routing, reschedule, and the next plan reflects the change. This guide walks the fields in the order you should fill them and shows how to confirm the result.

For what each mechanism models and why there are several fields rather than one, read queue and transit times explained first. For the exact order the engine applies them, see how EDGEBIC composes step timing.

Step 1: Pick the Step That Owns the Wait

Every one of these fields applies after its own step's operation finishes. So the question is not "which step is delayed?" but "which step causes the delay?"

• Parts must cool after milling: queue time on the milling step.
• Parts are trucked to a plater after deburring: transit days on the deburring step.
• Parts wait for an inspector before assembly: queue time on the step before assembly, or on the assembly step if the wait is really about assembly's own readiness.

Getting this backward is easy and produces a plan that is off by exactly one operation. If you are unsure, ask where a person standing on the floor would say the parts are sitting.

Open the routing in the Graphical Routing Designer or the routing grid, select that step, and work through the fields below.

Step 2: Queue Time, in Decimal Hours

Enter the wait in hours. Ninety minutes is 1.5. Twenty minutes is 0.33. Eight hours is 8.

The engine consumes those hours only inside active shifts on the work center's calendar. A four-hour queue that starts at 14:30 on a Monday with an 08:00 to 16:00 shift uses 1.5 hours before end of shift and the remaining 2.5 hours on Tuesday morning, resolving to Tuesday 10:30. Nights, weekends, and holidays do not tick.

Two rules keep queue time honest:

• Only use it for waits a person has to be present to end. Cooling, drying, drip time, an inspection queue. If the wait continues over a weekend regardless of whether the plant is open, it is not queue time.
• Do not put queue time on a step that also uses lot streaming. When streaming fires, its result becomes the successor's gate and the queue on that step is discarded. Use transfer delay instead, or move the queue to the downstream step.

Step 3: Transit Days, and the Calendar Question

If the work leaves the work center for a vendor or another site, set transit days on the sending step. This field is whole days, not hours.

Then make the calendar choice, which is a separate setting on the same step:

The two diverge fast. From an operation ending Thursday at 12:00, three calendar transit days lands Sunday at 12:00, so the next operation's first feasible slot in a Monday-to-Friday plant is Monday morning. Three working transit days counts Friday, Monday, Tuesday and resolves to end of shift Tuesday, so the next operation cannot start before Wednesday morning. Same number, two days of difference.

The default is calendar days, and for genuine outside processes that is almost always right. A plater's five-day turnaround does not pause because your plant is closed on Saturday.

One more detail: working-day transit is counted against the sending work center's calendar. If the sending and receiving stations are in different plants with different shift patterns, the count follows the sender, and the allocator then finds the first feasible slot at the receiver.

Step 4: Transfer Delay, for Handling That Never Pauses

Transfer delay is flat elapsed hours added after a lot streaming handoff. Enter it in decimal hours on the same step that carries the streaming setting.

Use it when the handling genuinely runs whenever material is ready: a conveyor, a robot cycle, a cooling period measured in minutes, a short cart run in a plant that always has somebody available. Do not use it for a wait that should stop at end of shift, because it will not. A two-hour transfer delay applied at 15:00 on a Friday resolves to 17:00 that Friday, past the end of an 08:00 to 16:00 shift.

Step 5: Leave Material Steps Alone

A material step already absorbs its transit internally when its own dates are built, so the engine deliberately skips the separate transit calculation for those steps. Adding transit days to a material step is harmless but does nothing extra. Adding it to a material step and the operation that follows it double-counts the same delay, which is the version that actually hurts.

Set the transit on the operation that physically sends the work, once.

Step 6: Reschedule and Read the Result

Save the routing and reschedule the job. Then verify in two places.

On the Gantt, measure the gap between the upstream finish and the downstream start. Expect a shift-aware queue to look longer in calendar terms than the number you typed whenever it crosses a night or a weekend: four hours of queue from Friday afternoon is a three-day gap on the chart and is completely correct. Reading the chart is covered in planned versus actual on the Gantt.

In the load, check the downstream work center. Every field here produces an earliest start, not a booking. If the gap is larger than your configuration explains, the machine was busy, and that is a capacity question rather than a routing question. Work center overloaded: causes and fixes covers the difference.

A Worked Configuration

Plating in-house, then inspection in another building. The plating operation ends Friday at 15:00 on a Monday-to-Friday, 08:00 to 16:00 calendar.

The engine composes it in order. The one-hour queue fits inside Friday's remaining shift hour, so it resolves to Friday 16:00. No streaming fires. One calendar transit day lands the handoff at Saturday 16:00. Inspection's first feasible slot is Monday 08:00.

Switch that step to working days and the single transit day counts Monday, resolving to end of shift Monday 16:00, so inspection lands Tuesday morning. One checkbox, one full day of quoted lead time. That is why the calendar choice deserves a deliberate answer per step rather than a default nobody reviewed.

What to Read Next

How EDGEBIC composes step timing shows the exact sequence when queue, streaming, and transit all appear on one step, with the arithmetic worked through. Queue and transit mistakes covers the configurations that quietly produce unachievable plans. For overlap rather than delay, see how to overlap operations.

For the wider picture, see the complete guide to EDGEBIC and forward versus backward scheduling, which determines which direction these buffers push from. Bring a routing with a vendor step on it to a demo of EDGEBIC and we will configure the send together.