Sharing a Gantt Configuration Across Planners in EDGEBIC

EDGEBIC separates two kinds of configuration that most schedule tools blur together: site-wide scheduling policy, which changes what the engine computes, and per-machine display configuration, which changes only what you see. That split is what makes a tuned Gantt portable. Get one board reading well, export it, and every other planning station can import the same picture without touching a single plan.

This post covers where each kind lives, what travels in an export, what deliberately does not, and the rollout sequence that keeps a team reading one chart the same way. It builds on the display vocabulary described in the visual scheduling pillar guide for EDGEBIC by User Solutions.

Two Homes, Two Blast Radii

The distinction is worth stating precisely, because acting in the wrong place is the classic mistake.

The consequence is liberating: nobody can damage the schedule from the Configuration tab. Explore it freely, because Reset to Defaults always brings the factory settings back.

What Travels in an Export

The Configuration tab is organized into General, Views, Appearance, Time & Schedule, and Manufacturing, and an export carries the whole set. In practice, the settings a plant actually tunes and therefore actually wants to share are these:

• Operation state colors, and which states are active at all. The legend is generated from this same list, so importing a configuration imports a matching legend automatically.
• Caption patterns per work center, built from the token picker. This is often the single most valuable thing to standardize, because it decides what each bar says. See reading operation description fields on a Gantt bar.
• Time segment display: setup, queue, teardown, move, and whether setup merges into the run, covered in what each segment of a Gantt bar means.
• Actual versus planned overlay: whether markers draw, whether variance flags, and the variance threshold in minutes.
• Timeline limits: how far the timeline scrolls and how many buffer weeks show beyond the computed range.
• Appointment permissions: create, edit, delete, copy, drag, resize, and dragging between work center rows.
• Update mode: whether Gantt edits batch until Save Changes or persist one at a time.

Three footer buttons handle the whole lifecycle: Reset to Defaults, Import, Export, plus Save and Apply Now Configuration to commit changes on the current machine.

What Does Not Travel, and Why That Is Correct

Two things deliberately stay personal.

Grid layouts save themselves per user. Every configurable grid and tree in EDGEBIC remembers column widths, order, visibility, pinning, sorting, grouping, and filters, restoring when you open a screen and saving when you navigate away. There is no Save Layout button because there is no save step. Those layouts follow the account, not the configuration file, which is what you want: the planner who lives in hour columns and the supervisor who lives in dates should not have to negotiate.

Scheduling policy is site-wide already. It does not travel in a display export because it does not need to. Change it once on the Settings screen and the next scheduler run uses it everywhere.

The Rollout That Works

A sequence that survives contact with a real team:

1. Tune one station. Pick the planner who reads the board hardest and get their display right: state colors, caption patterns per lane, segments, variance threshold, permissions.
2. Run the shipped defaults for two weeks first before repainting states. Teach the vocabulary, then customize it, not the other way around.
3. Export. Keep the file somewhere your team can find it, and note the date.
4. Import on every other planning station. Now a color means one thing plant-wide, and the legend on each board says so.
5. Re-export after every deliberate change. The export is the record of what your plant agreed a chart means.
6. Leave grid layouts alone. They are personal, they persist automatically, and a newly shipped column will still appear inside a saved layout rather than hiding behind it.

When You Need to Share the Schedule Itself

Configuration sharing standardizes the picture. Sharing the content with someone who is not sitting at a station is a different task, and EDGEBIC handles it through exports rather than by asking everyone to open the scheduler.

The Job View tab carries an Export Excel action alongside its job-level buttons, which is the usual route for handing one job's operation detail to a supervisor, a customer service rep, or a meeting. The routing behind a job exports too: switch a BOR to the data grid and use Export, and you get a faithful snapshot of the visible columns in their current sort and filter order, opening with a legend that explains the markers and tints. That export is deliberately not the import file format; loading data back in goes through the import and export masks.

The dividing line is clean. Configuration exports standardize how the chart looks. Data exports move what the chart says.

One Chart, One Meaning

Standardizing a display sounds like housekeeping until the first morning meeting where two people describe the same bar differently. A plant that has agreed what amber means, what a caption carries, and whether setup shows as its own segment has removed an entire category of argument from its day.

User Solutions has been helping manufacturers build that shared picture since 1991, from small shops to organizations including the US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, and Cummins. The pattern repeats: the plants that improve are the ones where everybody reads the same chart the same way, which is the practical promise of production scheduling done visually.

See the full EDGEBIC platform, or bring your current setup to a demo and let US help you decide what belongs in the shared configuration and what should stay personal.