Half the arguments about a production report are not about the data at all: they are two people using the same word for different quantities. Complete, available, utilization, backlog, late. Each of those has a precise meaning in EDGEBIC by User Solutions, and each has a near neighbour that looks identical on screen. Here are the eight that cause the most confusion, with the definition that resolves each one.
Every column below carries its own definition inside the product, one click away on the Column Details button, which is covered in how to use Column Details. The reports themselves are in the catalog overview.
1. Complete (the Status) Versus Percent Complete (the Ratio)
Two columns, two definitions, and they can legitimately disagree.
Percent complete is an hours ratio: actual hours over planned hours, capped at 100. It measures effort consumed.
Completed is a status, and it is strict: a job reads Completed only when every operational step carries an actual end date. Marking one early step complete does not flip the job, and the finish date stays empty until the last step is done, so a half-done job never shows a finish date.
So a job at 100% that is not Completed means the hours are all in and somebody has not closed the last operation. That is a floor question, not a data fault.
2. Hours-Based, Pieces-Fallback
Percent complete is hours-based by design. If planned and actual hours exist, the figure is the hours ratio. Only when no hours are logged does it fall back to a pieces ratio against the order quantity.
That fallback is where a surprising number comes from. On a single-piece job, a fractional auto-calculated piece count produces a percentage near zero, and a job that is nearly finished reads as barely started. The cure is upstream: log hours. Hours-based matching across the job view, the earned value report, and the end-product roll-up is what keeps three surfaces telling one story.
3. Available Hours, Three Different Ways
This is the most common cause of two reports disagreeing about the same station, and it is worth knowing precisely.
| Report | How available hours are derived |
|---|---|
| Work Center Utilization | Real shift calendars, instances, and per-day capacity overrides. The authority. |
| Work Center Performance | An approximation: 24 hours times days times instances times efficiency, ignoring calendars, weekends, and holidays |
| OEE availability | Configured shift hours per work center, falling back to eight hours per working day when no shifts exist |
Three defensible definitions serving three purposes. The rule that prevents the argument: capacity decisions use Work Center Utilization, and Performance is a fast trend comparison only. The consequences of getting this wrong are covered in report reading mistakes.
4. Utilization, Performance, Efficiency and Availability
Four ratios that all look like "how busy is the machine" and measure four different things.
| Term | Definition | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Utilization | Scheduled hours over available hours | How much of the capacity is spoken for |
| Rate performance | Actual hours over scheduled hours | Whether the work took as long as planned |
| OEE performance | Actual pieces over theoretical pieces from the routing cycle time | Whether the machine ran at its designed speed |
| OEE availability | Actual hours over shift-available hours | Whether the machine was running at all |
A station can be 100% utilized and 60% available: fully booked and frequently stopped. That combination is the classic hidden bottleneck, and it is invisible unless you read the two numbers as different questions. Our OEE guide and capacity utilization KPI cover the generic definitions.
5. Assigned Versus Backlog
On the resource calendar these sit one row apart and mean opposite things.
Assigned is the hours that land on a station in that period. It answers "when does the work happen?".
Backlog is the forward sum of remaining allocation hours from that period onward. It answers "how much is still ahead of this station?", and it burns down as work is consumed: a 24-hour step spread over three days reads 24, 16, 8, then 0, rather than repeating 24 until it finishes.
The practical difference: a station can look calm in Assigned because nothing is due this week, while its Backlog shows a mountain arriving next month. Rising backlog week over week is a lateness warning weeks before anything turns red on a heatmap. What to do when the red does arrive is in reading a red day.
6. The Late Family: Four Words, Four Meanings
| Term | Where it appears | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Days late | Late Jobs report | Scheduled end minus due date, in whole days, only shown when positive |
| Late | Job status donut | The plan itself misses the due date, or the job actually finished after it: structural |
| Overdue | Job status donut | The plan met the date, but the date has passed with the job unfinished: execution |
| Forecast late | On-Time Delivery report | An unfinished job whose scheduled end already exceeds its due date |
The distinction that matters operationally is structural versus execution. Late needs capacity, an alternate routing, or a renegotiated date. Overdue needs somebody to find out why the work stalled. Being physically started is a badge on the job list rather than a slice, because starting says nothing about whether a job will be on time. More on this in dashboard misreading mistakes.
7. Adherence Versus Attainment
Both are percentages, both have targets, and they measure opposite ends of a job.
Adherence is the share of operations that started within an hour either side of plan over the past 14 days, target 90% or better. It grades how closely the floor follows the sequence.
Attainment is the share of completed jobs that hit their due date, target 85% or better. It grades whether the customer got what was promised.
High adherence with low attainment means the floor is following a plan that was wrong. Low adherence with high attainment means the floor is rescuing a plan nobody follows. Those are different problems with different owners, which is exactly why both tiles sit side by side. See our schedule adherence KPI guide for the generic metric.
8. Forecast Columns and Their Signs
The earned value forecast pair trips people because one is a level and the other is a direction.
Estimate at completion is the forecast final hours for the job, given the burn rate so far. Higher than the budget means an overrun.
Variance at completion is budget minus forecast, so it is negative when the job will overrun. A 50-hour budget forecast to land at 55 hours shows minus 5.
Read the sign as direction, not as good or bad, and read it alongside the cost performance index, which will be below 1.0 on the same row. The full arithmetic is worked in the on-time reports deep dive.
Two More Worth Knowing
Product Id is an identifier, not a name. A column headed Product Id shows the product's unique number rather than a descriptive name, on both the job progress and sales order progress reports, where the end product column carries the routing's end item separately.
Instance means a physical unit inside a work center. A work center with three identical machines has three instances, and the dispatch report names which one an operation is booked on. Instance count is also the first thing to check when a station reads above 100% utilization, because a work center left at one instance while three machines exist reads triple its true load permanently.
The Habit That Settles All of Them
Each of these definitions is inside the product, attached to the column that uses it, with a formula, a unit, and three example values covering a nominal, a good, and a bad reading. Clicking Column Details before quoting an unfamiliar number is a two-second habit that prevents every disagreement above. The engineering that keeps those definitions accurate as formulas change is described in why every column carries its own definition, and the reader's overview is self-explaining reports.
For generic definitions your whole team can share, our manufacturing KPI guide is the reference, and the vocabulary follows the APICS and ASCM body of knowledge most planners already use. For the system computing these numbers, the complete EDGEBIC guide, and for what shops do with them, the documented results.
Want your team reading one set of definitions? Bring the metric you argue about to a demo.
Adherence measures starts, attainment measures finishes. Adherence is the share of operations that started within an hour either side of their planned start over the past 14 days, with a target of 90% or better, so it grades how closely the floor follows the plan. Attainment is the share of completed jobs that hit their due date, target 85% or better, so it grades whether customers got what they were promised.
Assigned answers when hours land, backlog answers how much work is still ahead. Assigned hours are the hours booked on a work center in that specific period. Backlog is the forward sum of all remaining allocation hours from that period onward, so it burns down as work is consumed: a 24-hour step spread over three days reads 24, then 16, then 8, then 0. Rising backlog week over week means work is arriving faster than the station clears it.
No, and that is the single most common source of two reports disagreeing. Work Center Utilization derives available hours from real shift calendars and per-day capacity overrides, and it is the authority. Work Center Performance approximates them as 24 hours times days times instances times efficiency, ignoring calendars and weekends. OEE uses configured shift hours, falling back to eight hours per working day when no shifts exist.
Because variance at completion is budget minus forecast, so a forecast larger than the budget produces a negative number. A job with a 50-hour budget forecast to land at 55 hours shows a variance of minus 5, meaning five hours of overrun. Read the sign as direction rather than as good or bad: negative variance at completion and a cost performance index below 1.0 always appear together on the same row.
Expert Q&A: Deep Dive
Q: Job Progress says a job is 100% complete and Job Progress also says it is not Completed. Which is it?
A: Both, and the two columns are answering different questions on purpose. Percent complete is an hours ratio, actual over planned, capped at 100, so a job can reach 100% while an operation still has no actual end date recorded. Completion status is stricter: a job reads Completed only when every operational step carries an actual end, and the finish date stays empty until the last one does, so one early step being marked complete cannot flip the whole job. Practically, a job showing 100% and not Completed means the hours are in and somebody has not closed the last operation. That is a two-minute floor question rather than a data problem.
Q: Our percent complete showed almost zero on a job we knew was nearly done. What causes that?
A: A pieces fallback firing when it should not. Percent complete is hours-based: if planned and actual hours both exist, the figure is actual over planned. Only when no hours are logged does it fall back to a pieces ratio, and on a one-piece job an auto-calculated fractional piece count produces a number near zero, which then reads as a job that has barely started. The fix is upstream and simple: log hours. Hours-based matching across the job view, the earned value report, and the end-product roll-up is what keeps all three telling the same story, and a job with no logged hours will always be guessed at rather than measured.
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