Preventive Maintenance and the EDGEBIC Kiosk: What Operators Actually See

The EDGEBIC by User Solutions kiosk shows exactly one banner, and it is not a maintenance banner: it warns that a job's routing changed after the job was scheduled. There is no preventive maintenance due warning at the terminal and no service interval tracked there. Maintenance reaches the plan a different way, on the planner side, by removing the hours from the machine's calendar so the scheduler stops booking work into them.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A reminder that nobody acts on changes nothing, and a reminder that the scheduler cannot see changes nothing either. The only step that moves work off a machine is the one that edits its available hours.

What the Kiosk Really Shows

The kiosk idle screen is built around the queue for the machine it is bound to: the next job, the jobs behind it, and the operator's own day so far. See what an operator sees at the kiosk for the full screen.

The one banner it raises is the routing change warning. If a job's routing was edited after that job was scheduled, a yellow banner tells the operator so and lists what changed, such as the work center, the setup, the cycle time, or the queue time. The operator acknowledges it and tells the planner if it looks wrong. That is covered in the BOR drift banner at the kiosk.

The kiosk is deliberately small. It does not browse jobs, it does not edit the schedule, and it does not track machine service cadence. Its job is to capture what happened at one machine accurately, and every feature it does not have is a feature that cannot go stale or get ignored.

Where Maintenance Actually Belongs

Protecting service time is a capacity decision, so it is made where capacity lives: on the work center, by a planner, before the scheduling run.

The mechanism is a per-day capacity override. You open the per-day capacity dialog on the work center, select the shift, find the date, and type the hours the machine can genuinely offer that day. Zero takes it out of the plan entirely; a smaller number models a partial day, so a four-hour service on an eight-hour shift becomes 4 rather than 0. Add a reason so the entry explains itself to whoever reads it next month.

The step-by-step version is how to block a machine for a maintenance day, and the mechanics of how the override beats the shift formula are in daily capacity overrides explained.

Two rules are worth internalizing. Overrides are per day and per shift, so a machine running two shifts needs the entry on both. And a per-day override wins over the shift calendar on any date it covers, which is exactly what you want for a machine that is physically apart on the bench.

Why a Plant Holiday Is the Wrong Tool

A plant holiday closes every work center on every shift. Reaching for one to take a single press down stops the entire factory, which is a large and very visible mistake. Plant holidays belong to national holidays and full shutdowns. Single-machine closures belong in a per-day capacity override on the machine concerned.

Nothing Moves Until You Run the Schedule

This is the point that turns a good intention into a real plan. Entering an override changes master data. It does not replan anything by itself. Work sitting on those hours stays there until a scheduling run reads the new calendar and places it elsewhere.

So the sequence is always the same:

1. Maintenance and planning agree on a window.
2. The planner enters the per-day capacity override on that work center, on every affected shift and date, with a reason.
3. The next scheduling run plans around the gap instead of into it.
4. The service is performed.
5. The planner resets the override so the normal shift formula applies again.

Step five is the one that gets skipped, and skipping it is expensive in the quiet way: a zero left in place keeps a healthy machine out of the plan, and nobody notices until the load looks strange a month later.

A Worked Example

Heat-1 is the shop's constraint. Maintenance wants four hours on 11 June, and the Day Shift runs eight hours.

The planner opens Heat-1's per-day capacity dialog, finds 11 June on the Day Shift, and enters 4 with the reason "planned service." Nothing changes yet.

The next scheduling run reads 4 hours instead of 8 for that date. Two operations that would have landed in the second half of the day are placed elsewhere, automatically, and no operator is told at one in the afternoon that their job is being pulled off the machine.

After the service, the planner clicks Reset. Heat-1 returns to its normal eight hours and the following run uses the full calendar again.

Because Heat-1 is the constraint, those four hours were worth planning a week ahead. On a machine running at 40 percent utilization the same decision would barely register in the schedule, which is a useful reminder that where you spend planning effort should follow the constraint.

Tracking the Cadence Itself

If your shop runs services on a calendar interval, that cadence lives in your maintenance system, a spreadsheet, or a wall planner. EDGEBIC's part of the job starts once a date is chosen: turn the agreed window into hours the scheduler will respect, then run the plan. Keeping the two concerns separate is honest about what the software does, and it avoids the failure mode where a machine is quietly assumed to be protected because a reminder was displayed somewhere.

The Bottom Line

The kiosk warns about one thing, a routing that changed after scheduling, and it does not track maintenance. To protect a service window, enter a per-day capacity override on the work center for the affected shift and date, add a reason, and run the schedule so work moves off those hours. Reset it when the machine is back. See the rest of the loop in the shop floor execution guide, or explore EDGEBIC.