Reconciling ERP Work Order Quantities After Partial Completion

Once a work order is partly finished, the quantity you import from the ERP has to agree with whatever else is telling EDGEBIC how far along the job is: import the original ordered quantity when actual hours reach EDGEBIC, import the ERP's remaining quantity when they do not, and never do both. Doing both subtracts the completed work twice, and the symptom is a schedule where every running job looks nearly done. This is the most common reconciliation problem in a mature ERP integration, and it does not appear until the second or third week.

EDGEBIC by User Solutions has managed this handoff since 1991, and across 35+ years of scheduling for the US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, and Cummins, the rule that holds is simple: exactly one system nets progress, and everyone knows which one.

What a quantity actually drives

The engine computes an operation's hours as setup plus run time multiplied by quantity. Setup is charged once per job; run time scales. So quantity is not a label on a job, it is a direct multiplier on machine time, and any error in it moves every downstream date on that job.

Take a routing step at 0.02 hours per piece with a 0.5 hour setup:

Now consider a 500-piece order with 300 pieces received. The remaining 200 pieces are worth 4.0 hours of run time. If the ERP exports 200 and the floor has separately logged the hours it took to make the first 300, the plan drops both, and the job appears to need a fraction of the time it really does.

The two clean patterns

Pick one. Write it down. Tell whoever builds the export.

Pattern A: actuals net the progress. Hours reach EDGEBIC from the kiosk or from an ERP labor transaction import. Export the original ordered quantity and leave it alone for the life of the job. The engine keeps logged hours locked on the days they were worked, holds the operation on its original machine, and re-plans only the remaining hours. The mechanism is covered in how partial completions carry forward.

Pattern B: the ERP nets the progress. No actual hours reach EDGEBIC at all. Export the remaining quantity and let each import restate the job as the work still to do. Simpler, and noticeably coarser, because pieces received is a blunt measure of how far into an operation you are.

Pattern A is the better plan when you have the data for it, because hours attach to the operation that actually consumed them, while a received piece count only tells you the job moved somewhere.

Why hours are the finer measure

Consider a five-operation part with 500 pieces released. All 500 have finished operation 10, half have finished operation 20, and none have reached 30. Receipts against the work order are still zero, because nothing has hit stock.

Pattern B sees a job with 500 pieces to make and no progress. Pattern A sees operation 10 complete, operation 20 half logged and re-planned for its remainder on the same machine, and operations 30 through 50 untouched. Only the second version can tell you which machine the job is sitting on tonight.

The trap in reverse: a blank quantity

Blank-cell preservation is a helpful mask behavior with one edge worth knowing. On an update run, a blank cell keeps the existing value rather than wiping it, so a partial refresh file is safe. A zero is a value, not a blank.

An ERP that emits zero in the open-quantity column for a job that is fully received will therefore set that job's quantity to zero rather than leave it alone. The job then schedules as setup only. Leave the column out of the export or filter the row out entirely rather than exporting zeros you do not mean.

Jobs that leave the export do not leave the plan

An import adds and updates. It does not delete records that are absent from the file. That is a deliberate safety property, because a filter mistake in an export should never wipe your schedule. It also means a work order closed in the ERP simply stops appearing, and its job stays in EDGEBIC consuming capacity.

Two habits keep this clean:

• Close finished jobs on the same cadence the ERP closes them. Add a step to the recurring routine that lists jobs not present in this week's export and closes them; the pass itself is walked through in closing ERP work orders that EDGEBIC still thinks are open.
• Filter the export on status rather than on a rolling date window. A job that leaves the file for a status reason is easy to reconcile. A job that leaves because it aged out of a 90-day window is not.

Phantom jobs are worse than untidy. They occupy machines that are genuinely free, so every capacity number reads pessimistic and new promise dates drift outward for no real reason.

Where quantity changes mid-flight

Sometimes the quantity legitimately changes: a customer increases an order, or scrap forces a replacement run. Re-importing handles it, and the re-import is safe.

• Completed work is never moved by a reschedule, so history is not at risk.
• A partly finished operation keeps its machine and its logged hours, and only the remainder is re-planned.
• Imported data sits until a planner runs the scheduler, so you can review the change before any date moves.

What deserves a look afterwards is the operation currently in progress, because a quantity increase adds hours to a step that is already running. Reconcile that one job by hand: setup plus run time times the new quantity across its operations, compared against the schedule.

Fold the check into the routine

The quantity reconciliation is a two-minute addition to the checks you already run after an import:

The full post-import pass is in the import reconciliation checklist, the cadence is in the weekly ERP sync routine, and the wider governance question of which system owns which field is in choosing the system of record for each scheduling field.

Once it agrees, the plan holds up

With one clear progress source, a running shop can be rescheduled daily without fear. Started work keeps its machine and its logged hours, only the honest remainder moves, and the finite capacity engine can apply the rest of the model: multiple shifts and machine instances, work center groups, sequence-dependent setups, lot streaming, and mathematical optimization with a proven optimality gap. The EDGEBIC product overview maps the engine, and the ERP integration architecture shows where the order import sits.

Bring a week of open orders

Export this week's open work orders for jobs that are genuinely part finished and bring them to a demo. Ten minutes of reconciling real quantities against real logged hours usually settles the original-versus-remaining question for good.