Planned Crew Versus Who Actually Worked in EDGEBIC

EDGEBIC by User Solutions keeps two separate labor records: the planned crew, booked in advance by the scheduler against an hours ledger, and the actual account, recorded by the operator name on every kiosk punch. They look similar on a screen and they answer completely different questions. Confusing them is how a shop ends up reporting labor history from a plan that was overwritten last night.

If your routing steps require certified operators, this distinction decides where every labor number you quote should come from.

What the Plan Books

When a routing step requires a skill, the scheduler cannot treat the machine as the only constraint. It has to prove a qualified, rostered person with free hours can actually stand there. So as it places work, it books operator hours against a ledger: so many hours for this person, on this date, in this shift.

Those bookings become the plan's crew. They are what tells you Thursday is staffable before Thursday arrives, and they are why an operation slides when the only certified welder is on vacation. That mechanism is covered in how operator skills gate work center assignment.

Three properties of these bookings matter here.

They are hours, not head assignments. The booking asks whether the pool can afford the work, and it draws from the least loaded qualified person first. One slice of an operation can consume hours from two people on the same day. That is capacity math, not a statement that both will physically be at the machine.

They are regenerated wholesale. Every reschedule deletes and rebuilds them along with the schedule rows they belong to. A booking is a property of the current plan and nothing more.

Completed steps carry none. Once an operation is finished, it stops holding anyone's planned hours. More on why that matters below.

What the Floor Records

The kiosk records something much simpler and much more durable. An operator types a name into the operator field, and that name rides on every punch made during the session: setup, run, pause with reason, rework, complete. See what an operator sees at the kiosk.

There is no login and no badge scan. The name is free text, and that is a deliberate choice about where identity actually needs to be strict. The consequence for labor reporting is that punches carry a person, an operation, a work center, timestamps, and pieces, all captured at the moment the state changed. That is a record you can stand behind.

Why They Are Allowed to Disagree

A supervisor swaps people between machines at 09:00 for a dozen good reasons the plan never knew about. The plan booked Joe. Maria ran it. Nothing is broken.

The plan's job was to prove the work was staffable by someone qualified and to reserve the capacity so two skill-hungry jobs did not both get promised the same welder. It did that job. Maria running the work instead does not retroactively invalidate the reservation, and forcing the two records to agree would mean either rewriting history to match a plan or rewriting a plan to match history. Both are worse than letting them differ.

The one case worth investigating is a mismatch that reveals a data problem: if Maria is not certified on that skill in the system, the punches are telling you your certification records are out of date. Fix the certification, not the punch. See skill expiry and recertification.

If you do want a named person locked to a step in the plan, that is what an operator pin is for, and it behaves quite differently: a pinned step waits for its person rather than substituting. See how the operator pin ties a named person to a job.

Completed Work Frees the Plan

The rule that completed steps hold no planned hours deserves its own note, because it prevents a slow leak.

On a reschedule, operations that were planned but not started still consume the pool: their labor is still ahead of you and still has to be affordable. Completed operations do not. The work is done, the hours are in the punch record, and the operator's future capacity should be free for whatever comes next. The same principle is explained from the scheduling side in why a completed step frees its operator.

If completed steps kept their bookings, every finished job would permanently reduce your apparent labor capacity, and after a busy quarter the scheduler would believe nobody was available to do anything.

A Worked Example

Tuesday. One certified TIG welder pool: Joe and Maria. Two jobs need TIG.

Plan, built Monday night. Job A books 6.0 hours, taken from Joe because he is least loaded. Job B books 5.0 hours, taken from Maria for the same reason. Both jobs are staffable, so both are placed on Tuesday.

What actually happened. Joe was pulled to a rush repair at 10:00. Maria ran both jobs, punching 4.0 hours on A and 4.5 on B before end of shift.

What each record says afterward. The plan says Tuesday was staffable and how it intended to fill it. The punches say Maria produced 8.5 productive hours across two jobs and that Job A is 2.0 hours short of its plan. The Wednesday reschedule reads the punches, not the bookings, plans the remaining work forward, and rebuilds the crew bookings from scratch.

Both records were right. Neither had to be corrected.

Where to Look for What

• Is next week staffable? The plan, through the schedule and the operator constraint.
• Who ran this job? The punch record on the operation.
• How many productive hours did a person log? Sum their run and rework punches. See how an operator's hours are attributed to a job.
• Why did this step slide to Thursday? The plan, usually a roster gap, a time-off range, or an expired certification.
• Did we lose time and why? The punch record, through pause reasons.

The Bottom Line

Planned crew is a projection that expires at the next reschedule. The punch record is history that never moves. EDGEBIC keeps them apart so a plan can be revised freely without disturbing what your shop actually did, and so labor reporting rests on observations rather than intentions. Report from punches, plan from the ledger, and let the two disagree when reality does. Follow the whole loop in the shop floor execution guide, or explore EDGEBIC.