Reading the EDGEBIC Gantt: Planned vs Actual at a Glance

On the EDGEBIC Gantt, planned versus actual is not two charts to reconcile: it is one chart that keeps both. The scheduling engine's dates stay stored alongside whatever the floor actually records, every bar draws at reality once reality exists, and the bar's state tells you at a glance whether an operation is untouched plan, moved plan, work in progress, or finished history. EDGEBIC by User Solutions builds its whole visual scheduling model on that comparison, because the gap between plan and actual is where every scheduling decision lives.

This post teaches you to read the chart cold: what a bar is, where its edges come from, what the states mean, and where the hours behind the picture are rolled up. It pairs with the colors and labels deep dive, which covers configuring the visuals; here we focus on reading them.

One Bar, One Operation

Start with the unit of the chart. One bar is one operation: one routing step of one job, running on one work center. A job for a three-step routing shows three bars, on three work center lanes, reading left to right in routing order because each step starts after the step it depends on.

EDGEBIC has two main Gantt surfaces, answering two different questions:

Both draw bars by the same rules, so learn to read once and it transfers.

Where a Bar's Edges Come From

This is the core mechanic. A bar's visual position follows a strict preference order:

1. No actuals recorded: the bar sits on the engine's scheduled dates. Pure plan.
2. Actual start recorded, no end: the bar starts at the real start and extends for the original planned duration. You see when work truly began and how long it was expected to take from there. This is an in-progress operation.
3. Both actuals recorded: the bar shows the real dates. Pure history.

Meanwhile the scheduled dates never disappear; they stay in the grid columns and in the database. That is why the bar can "disagree" with the Sched Start column and both be right: the bar is reality, the column is plan, and the distance between them is your schedule variance, visible without running a single report.

A bar that seems to skip a day usually is not variance at all: bar positions follow shift calendars, so the gap is a weekend, a holiday, or an off-shift window. The engine only places hours inside working shifts, which is what separates a finite capacity schedule from a drawing.

The States: What Each Bar Is Telling You

Every bar carries an operation state, shown by color against the legend strip. The exact colors are configurable per site, so match bars to your legend, but the states themselves are fixed vocabulary:

Notice how the states sort themselves into a planner's mental model:

• Plan states: Default, Rescheduled, Planned Applied. Nothing has physically happened.
• Reality states: Actual Start Applied, Applied, ERP Actuals, Completed. The floor has spoken.
• Attention states: Overridden (you have unsaved work) and Downstream Changed (the plan may no longer be internally consistent).

Two subtleties repay attention. Applied versus Rescheduled is exactly the planned-versus-actual comparison, automated: both are saved states with actuals, but Applied means the actuals differ from the plan (someone moved it) while Rescheduled means they match it exactly. And ERP Actuals outranks everything: if a bar is stuck in that state, the dates came from an external feed and the Gantt will not override them; correct the feed. That import path runs through the same import-export masks as the rest of the ERP data flow.

Two Special Bars That Are Not Operations

The lead-time tail. A slate bar labeled Lead Time appears after a job's last operation, spanning from the last work center's finish to the job's final availability date. It exists because promised dates include end-item lead time, and a chart that hid it would make delivery promises look earlier than they are. It consumes no capacity, and you cannot drag, resize, or edit it: it is information, not work. To change it, change the product's lead time.

The parallel marker. A bar marked with the parallel symbol is a parallel work center step. Dragging it moves its parallel siblings together, because those machines run the same operation in lockstep by definition.

The Job View Tab: the Hours Behind the Picture

Bar positions show when; the Job View tab shows how much. Pick a job and the summary panel reads:

A worked snapshot: a 20-unit job showing Total 16.5 h, Actual 6.0 h, Remaining 10.5 h, 36.4% complete. Those figures are summed from the job's actual operation rows, not from a static estimate typed at order entry, so they move as the floor logs hours.

Below the summary, the per-work-center grid gives one row per operation: Sched Start, Sched End, Actual Start, Actual End, plus scheduled, actual, and remaining hours and pieces, rate, and completion flags. This grid is planned-versus-actual in tabular form, and it is where you go when a bar raises a question the picture alone cannot answer.

The date window defaults to today minus 7 days through today plus 3 weeks; clear a picker and it falls back to the job's own first or last date on that side.

A Reading Drill

Open Schedule View on a live plant and try narrating one job aloud:

1. Saw bar: Completed shade. That work is history; nothing will ever move it.
2. Mill bar: Actual Start Applied, starting Tuesday 08:00 while its Sched Start column says Monday 08:00. Started a day late, still running, projected by planned duration.
3. Paint bar: Downstream Changed. The mill's slip means paint's plan may no longer hold; review it, or reschedule and let the engine re-plan it.
4. Slate Lead Time tail after paint: the customer-facing availability date includes lead time; do not promise the paint-finish date.

If you can narrate that, you are reading planned versus actual at a glance, which is the entire skill. Everything the floor logs (through the shop-floor screens covered in the shop floor guide) flows into the same picture, and the picture never asks you to choose between the plan and the truth: it shows both, and shows you the difference.

Why This Design Beats Two Charts

Plenty of tools show a plan. Some show actuals. The scheduling payoff is in the comparison, kept live: on-time analysis needs both dates; progress needs actual hours against planned hours; the decision to re-plan needs to know which operations are history and which are still movable. When GE Railcar rebuilt its scheduling practice on User Solutions tools, on-time shipping went from 30% to 90%, and that class of improvement starts with everyone seeing the same plan-versus-reality picture and trusting it. The company has been refining that discipline since 1991.

See the full EDGEBIC platform, start from the visual scheduling pillar guide, or bring a job that slipped last week to a demo and read its Gantt with US.