The Planned vs Actual Overlay as a Variance Tool

Because EDGEBIC stores the plan and the reality on every operation, the Gantt is a variance tool, not just a schedule. When work runs late, early, or on a different machine, the system does not throw the plan away and replace it with reality. It keeps both. The bar moves to show what actually happened, its color records how far that departed from the plan, and the hours roll-up puts a number on the gap. EDGEBIC by User Solutions is built so that plan versus reality is a property of the data, which means variance analysis is something you read, not something you assemble.

This post treats the Gantt as an analysis surface: how the overlay is stored, how the bar states separate confirmed plan from drift, and how the hours roll-up quantifies it. It builds on reading the EDGEBIC Gantt planned vs actual, which covers the states themselves, and sits under the visual scheduling guide.

Plan and Reality Are Stored Together

The foundation of variance analysis is that the plan survives contact with reality. When an operation gets actual dates, whether from a drag, a kiosk stamp, or a logged completion, EDGEBIC writes those actual dates but keeps the engine's original scheduled dates alongside them. Nothing overwrites the plan.

That single design choice is what turns the Gantt into a variance tool. The bar can draw at its real position, so the chart shows the truth of what happened, while the scheduled dates remain available in the grid columns for comparison. You are never looking at only the plan or only the reality. You are looking at both, with the difference between them made visible. A chart that discarded the plan the moment reality arrived could not tell you anything about drift, because the thing you drifted from would be gone.

The Bar States Sort Confirmed Plan From Drift

The overlay does more than store two dates. It classifies the relationship between them, and it paints that classification as color. Two states in particular are the heart of variance reading.

Applied (green) means the actual dates differ from the engine's plan. The operation moved: a late start, an early finish, a manual reroute. Applied is drift.

Rescheduled (blue) means actual dates exist and exactly match the scheduled dates. Reality confirmed the plan. This usually happens right after a reschedule run, where the engine re-times remaining work and the actuals line up with the fresh plan. Rescheduled is plan confirmed.

The practical value is a filter for your eyes. Scan a job's bars and the blue ones need no attention: they ran as planned. The green ones are the variance, the operations where reality parted from the schedule. A few more states extend the picture: Actual Start Applied (yellow) marks an operation that started but has not finished, Resource Replaced (purple) marks work that ran on a different machine than planned, and ERP Actuals marks dates fed from an external system that outrank every other state. But for a variance review, green versus blue is the first cut, and it is instant.

The Downstream Ripple Is Variance Propagation

Timing variance does not stay put. When one operation moves, the operations after it in the same job may no longer sit in a valid sequence, and EDGEBIC marks them amber, the Downstream Changed state. It is a review flag, not a data change, and it is exactly the propagation a variance analysis cares about: a late mill step does not just make the mill late, it threatens paint, assembly, and ship.

Reading the amber is reading how far a single slip reaches. A change that flags two downstream operations is contained; one that flags a dozen touched a critical machine. This is the same signal used to spot a bottleneck, seen through a variance lens: the machine whose slips ripple furthest is the machine your due dates depend on most.

Quantifying the Gap: The Hours Roll-Up

Colors tell you where drift happened. Numbers tell you how much. The Job View tab carries an hours roll-up header that shows the job's total, actual, and remaining hours plus percent complete, summed from the job's own operations.

Crucially, those figures come from the schedule graph, the actual scheduled and logged hours, not from the original quote estimate captured when the job was entered. That estimate is frequently zero for a scheduled job and would make a fully-planned job read as no progress. The roll-up avoids that trap by reading reality. So when a job shows 36 percent complete but its actual hours are already past a third of its total, the header states the overrun in hours: you are consuming time faster than you are completing work. That is variance you can act on before the remaining steps inherit the same drift. Reading those hours is covered in what planned vs actual hours means.

A Worked Example: Reading a Week's Drift

Acme Industries runs a Friday review. A planner opens the Gantt, filters to this week's jobs, and reads the overlay.

Most bars are blue, Rescheduled: those operations ran when the engine planned them, and the planner passes over them. A cluster of green Applied bars sits on the CNC-Mill-1 lane. Three jobs' milling steps ran late, and each one flagged its downstream paint and assembly operations amber. The pattern is clear from color alone: the mill is where the week's drift originated, and it propagated forward through three jobs.

The planner opens Job View for the worst of the three. The roll-up header shows the job 40 percent complete but its actual hours already at 55 percent of total. The mill step overran its planned hours, not just its planned dates. That is a work-content problem, not only a timing one, and it will not fix itself by rescheduling: the remaining steps are planned against hours that are proving optimistic. The planner flags the job for a standards review, then reschedules the three affected jobs so their downstream steps re-time around the real mill finishes, clearing the amber on reload.

None of that required a separate report. The color sorted confirmed plan from drift, the amber traced the propagation, and the roll-up quantified the overrun. The Gantt was the variance report.

Variance You Can See Is Variance You Can Fix

The reason on-time performance improves when a shop can see plan against reality is not mysterious. GE Railcar moved on-time shipping from 30 percent to 90 percent by scheduling against its real constraints and watching where reality diverged from the plan. User Solutions has built plan-versus-actual into its scheduling tools since 1991, for shops and for names like Cummins and the US Navy, because a variance you cannot see is a variance you cannot correct until a customer calls.

Keep the plan when reality arrives, let the colors sort confirmed from drifted, and let the roll-up put a number on it. Bring a week of real actuals to a demo and read the drift together. Give US a chance to show you where your plan and your floor part ways.