How to Set Up Work Centers in EDGEBIC: A Field-by-Field Guide

To set up a work center in EDGEBIC you need three things in place before anything else: a shift that defines working hours, the real machine count, and a decision about whether this resource follows the plant calendar or its own. Everything else on the configuration dialog refines the plan. Those three decide whether it exists at all.

EDGEBIC by User Solutions puts work center creation behind one dialog with a small number of fields, most of which have sensible defaults. This guide walks through each field, says what it changes, and flags the two places where a wrong entry is silent rather than loud. If you want the concepts behind the settings first, read work centers explained.

Before You Start

Shifts come first. Build the plant calendar before the machines, as described in how to set up shifts, holidays, and downtime.

Step 1: Open the Work Center Screen

Open the Workcenter tab from the main navigation. The Work Center Management page lists everything you have, with columns for the identifier, name, unit of measure, capacity type, instance count, shift calendar badge, One Per Day, Continuous-Process, and an actions column.

The actions column on each row carries four buttons worth knowing now:

• Edit (pencil): reopens the configuration dialog.
• Per-day capacity (chart): the override dialog covered in step 5.
• Setup matrix (gear): sequence-dependent changeover times for this machine.
• Remove (trash): blocked if anything still references the work center.

Step 2: Add the Work Center

Click Add Work Center. The Work Center Configuration dialog opens on the Basic Information tab.

Two entries deserve a pause.

No.Instances is only for machines that are genuinely identical: same speed, same shifts, same tooling. If they differ, create separate work centers and pool them in a work center group instead. Keep the count a whole number; fractional values are accepted for a half-capacity unit, but whole numbers are the norm.

Cost per Hour feeds margin math. A work center saved at zero will quote a job that costs nothing to make.

Click Save. With Use Global Shifts checked, the work center immediately works every global shift and needs no further calendar setup.

Step 3: Confirm What the Grid Says

Read the new row before moving on. Two columns are the fast sanity check:

• Instances should match the machines on the floor.
• Shift Calendar should read a green Global badge for anything that follows the plant pattern.

If capacity looks half or double what you expect later, these two columns are where the answer usually is.

Step 4: Give One Machine Its Own Calendar (Only if It Needs One)

Most work centers should stay Global. Override the calendar when a resource genuinely runs a different pattern: a mill staffed only on nights, a cell that works Monday through Thursday, a subcontracted resource available on fixed days.

1. Click Edit on the work center row.
2. Select the Associated Shifts tab.
3. Untick Use Global Shifts. The shift management buttons become editable.
4. Build the calendar:
   • Add Existing Shift opens a picker; tick shifts and click Add Selected, which copies the pattern locally as a starting point.
   • Create New Shift defines a shift that belongs to this work center alone.
   • On each shift card you can rename it, toggle weekdays, and set start and end times per day.
   • Remove Selected Shift detaches one.
5. Click Save. The grid now shows the amber Custom badge.

The badge is a warning as much as a label. A Custom work center no longer follows global shift edits, and the tooltip says so plainly. When the plant pattern changes, visit your exceptions or re-tick Use Global Shifts to rejoin the plant calendar.

Here is what the change buys. A 16-hour milling operation on a day-shift-only mill runs Monday 08:00 to 16:00 and Tuesday 08:00 to 16:00, finishing Tuesday afternoon. Move that mill to a 16:00 to 00:00 night shift and the same operation finishes at the same time, but the plant now has 16 hours a day of milling capacity across the two mills instead of 8. Day jobs stop queueing behind night work.

Step 5: Override Capacity for Specific Days

Use a per-day override for one-off realities the calendar should not absorb: approved Saturday overtime, a half-day PM window, a temporarily de-rated machine.

1. Click the per-day capacity button on the work center row. You can also double-click a Total Capacity cell in Schedule > Resource Calendar.
2. Pick the shift and adjust the date range.
3. The dialog shows a stacked bar per day (loaded, free, over capacity) plus a summary card.
4. In the grid below, type the new value in the Capacity (h) column for the target day and add a Reason.
5. The change saves as you edit. The Overridden column ticks.
6. To undo it, click Reset on the row.

The one rule that catches people: enter the total hours for the day, not per-machine hours. On a three-instance work center, "each machine gets 4 hours" is a Capacity (h) of 12. The engine does not multiply the override by the instance count.

Step 6: Set the Two Flags Through Import

Is Bottleneck and One Per Day are not on the edit dialog in the current release. They are loaded through the work center import (the toolbar import button), using the Is_Bottleneck and One_Per_Day_Flag columns. A truthy value (1, true, yes) switches the flag on, and re-importing updates existing work centers.

That import path is the same flexible Excel and CSV mask used to bring work centers in from an ERP export in bulk, which is how most implementations create the first thirty work centers rather than typing them. See EDGEBIC ERP integration.

Step 7: Take a Work Center Out of Service Correctly

Machines leave the floor, and how you record that matters more than it looks.

For a machine that is gone permanently: untick Is Available and save. The scheduler skips it entirely on the next run, jobs routed through it move to a configured alternative or slide, and every past schedule and report still resolves the name.

For a machine not yet commissioned: set an Effective Date. The work center exists, routings can reference it now, and capacity appears on the date the machine does.

For a bounded outage: use a per-day or date-range capacity override across the affected dates instead. The override carries a reason, expires by itself, and leaves the instance count and availability describing the plant as it really is. Dropping an instance count for a three-week rebuild works too, but it removes capacity from every date with no record of why, and it depends on someone remembering to restore it.

For a single machine inside a multi-instance work center: mark that instance unavailable. The engine skips it during selection and the other machines carry on normally.

Deletion is the last resort and it is guarded. If the work center appears on any active routing step, alternative or parallel configuration, schedule, or capacity override, the delete is blocked until those references are removed or reassigned. That guard prevents orphaned routings, which break scheduling for every product that used the machine and surface as an error nowhere near the cause.

What Happens After You Save

The single most common surprise is the first row of that table restated: saving master data never reschedules. Run Drive Schedule and review the result before you communicate dates.

Next

Configure the numbers, then understand what the engine does with them: how EDGEBIC calculates work center capacity walks the arithmetic day by day. Before you go live, read the configuration mistakes that cost the most, and if a machine goes quiet, the zero-capacity checklist finds it in five minutes.