The Planner View in EDGEBIC: Jobs and Machines on One Board

The Planner view in EDGEBIC by User Solutions is the Schedule View lane arrangement that stops making you choose between reading a job and reading a machine. A block of job lanes sits on top, the complete block of machine lanes sits underneath, and the gesture between them is a drag. Reading down the top block is a routing. Reading down the bottom block is the plant's load. Dragging from top to bottom is an assignment.

That sounds like a layout preference. It is closer to a workflow change, because the everyday planning question has always needed two screens and a good memory.

The Question Every Other Lane Mode Answers Halfway

Lane the Schedule View by WorkCenter and you get every machine's load, which is what you want when you are hunting for headroom. But a single job's routing is scattered across half a dozen lanes, so working out which bar on the packed mill lane belongs to the job you care about is a squint and a guess.

Lane it by Job and the routing reads cleanly end to end, but every machine has vanished from the board. There is nothing to drag onto.

Lane it by ResourceGroup and interchangeable machines collapse behind a single roll-up lane, which is exactly right for a capacity conversation and exactly wrong when you need to pick one specific machine.

So the ordinary question, this mill is overloaded on Thursday, where else could this job's operation go and what is that machine already carrying, has never had a single surface that answers it. The Planner view is that surface.

The Two Blocks

The board draws in two stacked blocks.

The upper block is the job block. One lane per job, captioned with its job number, listed by priority and then by job number. That lane carries every operation of that job in routing order, left to right. Read a lane across and you have read the routing.

The lower block is the machine block. It is the same set of work center lanes the Workcenter view gives you, in the same order, and it shows each machine's total load: every job on it, not only the jobs whose lanes appear above. Read a lane across and you have read that machine's week.

The two blocks are kept apart on purpose. Lane ordering, which you control with Seq.No in the Detail Schedule Resources grid, sorts rows within their own block. A job can never be pushed below the machines and a machine can never be lifted above the jobs, whatever numbers you use. That separation is the guarantee the layout is built on, and it is why the board stays legible when the job list gets long.

One Operation, Drawn Twice

Because both blocks are on screen at once, every operation appears twice: once on its job's lane and once on the lane of the machine it runs on. That is deliberate, and it is not a duplicate you have to keep in step. It is one operation drawn twice. The two bars carry the same caption, the same state color and the same window, and when one moves the other follows in the same instant. The mechanics are covered in why an operation appears twice in the Planner view.

One documented corner: an operation that belongs to no job has no job lane, so it draws only once, in the machine block. Work with it there exactly as you would in the Workcenter view.

Switching the Board

The lane arrangement is a display setting, so it lives with the rest of the Schedule View display configuration.

1. Open the Schedule tab, then the Schedule View tab.
2. Open the Configuration sub-tab, which sits beside Scheduler.
3. Stay on the General tab and find the Detail Schedule Resources panel.
4. Set the View by: dropdown to Planner.
5. Click Apply & Save.
6. Return to the Scheduler sub-tab. The board rebuilds with the two blocks.

The choice is saved with the rest of your configuration and persists between sessions. To go back, choose WorkCenter and click Apply & Save again. The full comparison of the five options is in how to choose a schedule lane mode.

What You Actually Do With It

Three gestures carry most of the value.

Assign an operation to a machine. Find the operation on its job lane, drag it down onto the machine lane you want it to run on, and drop it at the time slot you want. The machine change and the time change stage together as one edit. Step by step in how to assign an operation to a machine.

Float the machines that matter. Click any bar and the machine block re-sorts around it: the machine it currently runs on, then the other active members of that machine's work center group, then the rest of that job's routing. The alternatives you are allowed to use end up adjacent to the operation instead of buried in an alphabetical list. See how to float the machines that matter.

Re-time without reassigning. Drag along a job lane and only the time changes. Drop an operation back on the machine it is already on and EDGEBIC reads it as a re-time, never as a second assignment, as explained in dropping an operation back on its own machine.

All three inherit the staging model the rest of the Schedule View uses: nothing is written until you press Save Changes, and Discard puts every pending bar back. See staged changes on the Planner board.

When Not to Reach for It

The Planner view earns its screen when you are moving work between machines. It is a poor choice for two other jobs.

If you want depth on one order, hours logged against hours planned, percent complete, per-operation dates, go to the Job View cockpit. If you are handing a supervisor their station's queue, give them the work center schedule view, not a board carrying every job and every machine in the plant.

And be honest about scale. Every loaded job gets a lane, so the job block grows with your job selection. Untick Show in Detail Schedule Resources for jobs you are not planning against, or narrow the job selection in the left panel, rather than scrolling past rows that are not part of today's problem.

The Point

Planning software has spent decades asking planners to hold half the picture in their head while looking at the other half on screen. The Planner view is a small structural answer to that: put the job's shape and the plant's load in one frame, and make the move between them a drag rather than a decision you have to remember across two screens.

User Solutions has been building scheduling tools with manufacturers since 1991, in small shops and in organizations including the US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, and Cummins, and the pattern behind this view is the same one that holds everywhere: planners think in relationships, and a surface that shows the relationship beats one that makes you reconstruct it.

See the full EDGEBIC platform, start with the visual scheduling pillar guide, or bring a genuinely overloaded machine to a demo and let US show you the two-block board it belongs on.