Reading the Work Center Lanes on the EDGEBIC Schedule

On the EDGEBIC Gantt, every work center gets its own lane, and reading those lanes is how you see the shop from the machine's point of view. A job read across the lanes shows its path from operation to operation. A single lane read left to right shows one machine's entire workload over time. Together they let you answer the two questions a planner lives on: where is this job, and how loaded is that machine. EDGEBIC by User Solutions organizes the schedule this way so the plant's capacity is legible one row at a time.

This post explains what a lane is, how to read stacked and overlapping bars, and what happens when you move an operation from one lane to another. For the wider tour, see the visual scheduling guide.

Two Ways to Read the Same Chart

The Gantt is a grid: time runs across the top, work center lanes stack down the side, and each operation is a bar placed in its machine's lane at its scheduled time. Because of that layout you can read it two ways, and both are useful.

Read across the lanes and you follow one job. Its operations sit in different lanes because each step runs on a different machine, and they read left to right in routing order: saw first, then mill, then paint, each starting after the one before. That is the job's path through the shop.

Read down a single lane and you see one machine's life. Every bar in the mill lane is an operation the mill has to do, from every job, laid out in time. Gaps are idle stretches; dense runs are busy stretches. This is the view that reveals load, and it is how you spot a bottleneck: the constraint is the lane with no gaps.

Filtering helps with both. The left panel lists every job with a checkbox, and unchecking jobs clears their bars from every lane, so you can isolate one job's path or thin a busy lane down to the jobs you care about.

Stacked Bars and Instances

A lane can hold more than one bar in the same time slot, and whether that is normal or a warning depends on the machine's instances.

A work center with multiple instances is one lane representing several identical units. Such a machine can run more than one operation at once, so several bars sitting in the same slot is correct: each instance is carrying a job. A three-instance machine showing three bars in one slot is fully and legitimately loaded, not overbooked.

A single-instance machine is different. It can run one operation at a time, so two bars overlapping in its slot means you have stacked work on top of itself. EDGEBIC does not block that. Its model is override-and-warn, one of the real trade-offs of drag and drop scheduling: you can drag a bar into an occupied slot, the system trusts your judgment, and it leaves the overload visible for you to resolve with a reschedule. So an overlap in a single-instance lane is a to-do, while an overlap in a multi-instance lane is business as usual. Reading the difference is a matter of knowing the machine's instance count.

Parallel Steps Move as a Group

Some operations are not alone in their slot by coincidence; they are synchronized. A parallel work center step, marked with the parallel symbol on its bar, is one of a group meant to run in lockstep. The classic case is one part drilled by three spindles at once: three lanes, three bars, all starting and ending together.

Because those bars must stay synchronized, dragging one moves the whole group. Grab the marked bar, slide it to a new time, and its siblings follow to the same slot. This is deliberate. Splitting a synchronized group apart would break the physical reality it models, so EDGEBIC keeps them together automatically. When you see the parallel symbol, expect a group, and expect it to move as one.

Moving an Operation Between Lanes

The most powerful lane action is dragging an operation from one lane to another. That is not just a visual move; it reroutes the operation to a different machine.

Suppose CNC-1 is booked solid and CNC-2 sits idle next to it. Drag the operation's bar down from the CNC-1 lane into the CNC-2 lane. The bar enters the pending Overridden state, staged but not yet saved. Press Save Changes and the operation is recorded on CNC-2, and the bar turns purple, the Resource Replaced state, so anyone reading the chart later can see this operation was moved off the machine the engine chose.

EDGEBIC keeps the original work center alongside the new one. That is why the bar still shows purple on the next reload: the system always knows the engine's plan and your override, so plan versus reality is never lost. What the drag does not do is re-run capacity math. It records the machine change; it does not re-plan the rest of the job. When you want the engine to work around your move, press Re-Schedule for the affected jobs. This staging behavior is the same across every drag, and the full mechanics are in drag and drop rescheduling in EDGEBIC.

Focusing a Crowded Lane

A busy plant puts a lot of bars in front of you, and reading one lane means quieting the others. EDGEBIC gives you two tools for that. The job filter in the left panel is the blunt one: uncheck jobs and their bars leave every lane, so you can pare the chart down to the two or three jobs you are studying. There is a search box to find a job number fast and a control to re-check everything when you are done.

The second tool is sharper. Right-click a bar and choose to shade the other jobs' operations, and every job except the focused one dims, so a single job's path stands out across the lanes while the rest recede into the background rather than disappearing. Use the filter when you want other jobs gone, and the shade when you want them present but muted. Both let you read a crowded lane without losing the context around it, which is often exactly what you need when deciding whether a slot is really free.

A Worked Example: Rebalancing Two Mills

Acme Industries has two identical mills, CNC-1 and CNC-2. A rush job lands and the planner needs an operation done today, but the CNC-1 lane is a solid run of bars while CNC-2 has an open afternoon.

The planner filters to the rush job, sees its milling operation sitting behind three others in the CNC-1 lane, and drags that bar down to the open slot in the CNC-2 lane. The bar goes orange, Overridden, pending. Two later operations in the same job turn amber, Downstream Changed, because their timing now depends on the mill finishing earlier. The planner reviews the pending set, presses Save Changes, and the milling bar turns purple on CNC-2. To let the rest of the job settle around the earlier mill finish, the planner presses Re-Schedule for that job, and the engine re-plans its remaining steps, clearing the amber flags on reload.

No spreadsheet could have shown that the rebalance was possible, because the whole opportunity was visual: one lane full, the next lane open, a bar that could slide between them. Reading the lanes is what made the fix obvious.

The Lane Is the Machine's Voice

A dispatch list tells a machine what to run next. A lane on the Gantt shows a machine its whole day, its whole week, next to every other machine's. That is the difference between managing one operation at a time and managing capacity. User Solutions has built this view for manufacturers since 1991, for small shops and for names like GE and Cummins, because planners think in machines and jobs at once, and the lane layout lets them hold both in view.

Read across for the job, down for the machine, and drag between lanes to rebalance. Bring your busiest work center to a demo and watch its lane fill and empty as you move work. Give US a chance to show you the shop from the machine's side.