Showing Live Progress on Routing Diagram Nodes in EDGEBIC

The routing diagram in EDGEBIC does not have to be a static drawing of how a product is made: on a scheduled job, each work center node can carry a live details line showing planned hours, actual hours, and dates pulled from that job's schedule. The same flow chart that planned the work becomes a status board in routing order, which is a genuinely different object from a Gantt.

This post covers where the setting lives, what it can show, why the pattern is deliberately separate from the Gantt's bar captions, and how to keep a large diagram readable once numbers land on it. It assumes familiarity with the canvas from the graphical routing designer tour in EDGEBIC by User Solutions.

Where Node Display Fields Live

This is a feature of the Scheduled Job BOR tab, not the standard routing designer, and the reason is straightforward: live progress requires a job. A standard routing is a recipe, and a recipe has no actual hours.

Open the Schedule tab, then the Scheduled Job BOR tab, pick a job in the Schedule Job selector, and switch to Designer. You are now editing that job's own frozen copy of the routing, with a live header strip above the canvas showing job progress, actual versus estimated hours, the current step, the projected finish, and the due date.

Select a work center node and find Node Display Fields in the Properties panel. It works as a small pattern builder:

1. Pick a field from the drop-down (its watermark reads Data Source).
2. Click Add to append that field's token to the pattern box.
3. Repeat to combine fields.
4. Tick Apply to all work centers to push the same pattern to every node on the diagram.
5. Save with Update this Job BOR.

The pattern box's own hint states the default plainly: empty means the node shows only the work center name.

Why the Default Is Empty

Node boxes deliberately show a single title so large diagrams stay readable. Type and status live in the tooltip and the Properties panel, which is why hovering before editing is the standing advice on this canvas, covered in what a routing node tooltip tells you.

Node Display Fields follow the same restraint. A node stays a name until you opt fields back on, and there is deliberately no automatic fallback to the Gantt's bar caption pattern. That is a design decision worth understanding: every work center ships with a non-empty default caption pattern for the Gantt, so a silent fallback would put text on every node of every diagram the first time anyone opened one. Blank by default, instrumented on purpose.

Two Surfaces, One Token Idea

The Gantt's bar captions and the diagram's node lines are the same idea rendered by the same underlying mechanism, with separate patterns per surface.

That split is the useful part. A milling lane on the Gantt can show remaining hours for every job that touches it, while the diagram for one late job shows planned versus actual on each step of that job specifically. The Gantt token language is covered in reading operation description fields on a Gantt bar.

A site-wide default node pattern per work center can also be set in the scheduler configuration, and the node-level pattern overrides it for the job you are looking at.

What to Put on a Node

The productive combinations are short. Planned hours next to actual hours answers "is this step behaving," which is the question a routing diagram is uniquely good at, because the eye reads the chain in process order rather than in calendar order.

A practical starting pattern:

• Planned hours and actual hours on every node. Two numbers, one comparison, in routing sequence.
• Dates on the constraint step and the final step only, where a slip has downstream meaning.
• Nothing at all on material and product nodes, which book no capacity and have no hours to report.

Two or three fields per node is the ceiling. Past that a diagram of any size stops being a diagram, and you would be better served by the Job View grid, which is built for dense per-operation numbers and is described in the Job View cockpit.

A Worked Reading

Take a job whose routing runs saw, mill, assembly, with the pattern set to planned and actual hours on all three nodes.

1. Saw shows 20.5 planned and 20.5 actual. The step behaved, and it is complete.
2. Mill shows 51.0 planned and 34.0 actual, and the header strip names it the current step. Two thirds of the way through and tracking to plan.
3. Assembly shows 30.5 planned and no actual yet. Not started.

Now the value of the layout: those three readings sit in the order the product is built, so the eye moves the way the material moves. The projected finish in the header tells you where that chain lands, and the due date beside it tells you whether that is a problem. Nobody opened a report, and nobody had to reconstruct routing order from a date-sorted grid.

Save, Then Reschedule, in That Order

One habit prevents confusion. Update this Job BOR saves the recipe and the display pattern for that job's copy only. It does not move anything on the Gantt. The plan changes when you reschedule, and even then, completed steps are never re-planned.

That separation is the same contract that makes per-job routing edits safe on a live floor, described in editing a live job's routing. Change the recipe deliberately, reschedule deliberately, and the two acts never surprise each other.

The Drawing That Reports on Itself

A routing diagram that carries live numbers is a small feature with an outsized effect on how a job gets discussed. Planners argue about sequence in front of a picture of the sequence. Supervisors see which step is eating hours, in the order the parts flow, without translating a calendar back into a process.

User Solutions has been building that kind of shared picture with manufacturers since 1991, from small job shops to organizations including the US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, and Cummins. It is the same reason visual production scheduling beats a table: the picture answers the question the room is actually asking.

See the full EDGEBIC platform, start from the visual scheduling pillar guide, or bring one late job to a demo and let US show you its routing reporting on itself.