Planned Start Pins: Parking a Future Operation Without Faking an Actual

A planned start pin in EDGEBIC lets you park a future operation on a chosen date and machine without recording an actual, so your intent survives the next reschedule and your progress numbers stay honest about what has actually happened. EDGEBIC by User Solutions added the pin precisely so planners never have to fake an actual start just to hold a future position. This post explains what the pin does, when to reach for it, and why it is the correct tool for planning ahead.

If you are still learning the Gantt's drag modes in general, read drag-and-drop rescheduling first; this post zooms into one mode and its behavior across reschedules.

Three Drag Modes, One That Plans the Future

Before you drag a bar, the Drag writes: selector on the toolbar decides what saving that drag records. It has three settings, and only one is for planning ahead:

The rule of thumb is worth memorizing: past gets Actual Start & End, running gets Actual Start, and future gets Planned Start. Dragging a future operation with an actuals mode selected tells EDGEBIC the work already happened, which quietly skews progress and earned-value figures. The Planned Start pin exists so you never have to.

What the Pin Actually Writes

When you drag a bar in Planned Start mode and Save, EDGEBIC writes a durable planned start date on that operation and nothing else. No actual start, no actual end. The bar moves to the Planned Applied state, a color that means exactly "a future start is pinned here, and no actual exists yet."

Because no actuals are written, everything downstream stays truthful:

• Percent-complete for the job does not move, because no work was recorded as done.
• Earned-value and progress reports show the operation as still ahead of you, not behind.
• The planned versus actual picture stays clean, with the pin sitting in the plan lane where it belongs.

The pin is a statement of intent, and EDGEBIC treats it as one.

How the Reschedule Honors a Pin

The pin's real power shows up when you press Re-Schedule. A plain drag records dates but does not re-plan; the pin, by contrast, changes what the engine does on its next run. Here is the behavior:

• The engine plans to the pin. On reschedule, a pinned operation is placed on its pinned date, the same way a real actual start would anchor it. You are steering the engine, not fighting it.
• The work center locks. If you pinned the operation onto a different machine, that machine choice survives the reschedule too, so a deliberate reroute holds.
• Backward scheduling steps aside. For a job that carries a pin, whole-job backward scheduling is suppressed, because you have already stated where a step must begin.
• A real actual always wins. The instant the operation actually starts and someone logs it, the pin dissolves and the real start takes over. The pin is scaffolding for the future, not a permanent fixture.

Direction precedence inside the engine runs anchor, then actual, then planned pin, then backward, then forward. In plain terms: a real start beats your pin, and your pin beats the engine's default forward placement. That order is what lets you plan ahead confidently without overriding history you have already recorded.

A Worked Sequence

Take a widget job running saw, then mill, then paint, with none of it started yet.

1. Monday morning every bar shows the neutral Default state, the engine's plan.
2. Sales asks whether paint can wait until Thursday for a color change. Painting has not begun, so you set Drag writes: to Planned Start, drag the paint bar to Thursday 08:00, and Save. The bar shows Planned Applied. Nothing claims painting happened.
3. You press Re-Schedule. The engine keeps saw and mill flowing, plans paint to Thursday because of the pin, and re-plans the rest of the job around that fixed point.
4. Thursday arrives, painting actually starts, and the operator logs the real start. The pin quietly dissolves; the paint bar now carries a genuine actual start.

Three states, one clean story, and at no point did you record a start that had not happened.

When to Use It, and When Not To

Reach for a planned start pin whenever you need a future operation to sit somewhere specific and stay there through the next engine run:

• Holding a step for a promised date, a material arrival, or a color or tooling change.
• Reserving a machine for a job you know is coming, before it starts.
• Steering the engine toward a placement you prefer without hand-freezing the whole job.

Do not use it for work that has already happened or is under way. That is what the two actuals modes are for, and using them keeps your history accurate. And remember the override-and-warn contract: a pin, like any drag, records intent rather than re-checking capacity. If pinning an operation onto a busy machine creates a squeeze, EDGEBIC warns but does not block, and a reschedule is how you let the engine re-plan around the pin. Rescheduling only ever touches the jobs you changed, so the rest of the plant stays put.

Why This Design Matters

The planned start pin resolves a tension every scheduler feels: you often know where a future operation should go before it starts, but recording that as an actual corrupts your progress data. The pin gives intent a home of its own. It survives reschedules like an actual, respects real actuals when they arrive, and never pretends the future is the past. That is what "planning ahead" should mean, and it is why the pin sits alongside the actuals modes rather than as a workaround for them.

See the full EDGEBIC platform, read the visual scheduling pillar guide, or bring a job with a fixed future milestone to a demo and pin it with US, then reschedule and watch the engine honor it.