The Settings That Change How Your Schedule Looks (and the Ones That Change the Plan)

Gantt display settings scheduling teams argue about are almost never the settings that change the plan. That is the useful discovery hiding inside EDGEBIC by User Solutions: the product draws a hard line between presentation and engine, and once you know where the line runs, most configuration arguments resolve themselves. Colors, labels, overlays, timeline range, and drag behavior are display. Direction, short-confirm handling, sub-assembly explosion, and capacity search are policy. Nothing in the first group moves an operation.

This post walks the boundary, then the three places where it is genuinely easy to cross by accident. The full map of where settings live is in EDGEBIC configuration options explained, and the policy screen itself in how to configure scheduling policy in EDGEBIC.

The Line, Stated Once

The engine's inputs are master data and policy. Everything else on your screen is a rendering decision, and rendering decisions can be wrong without being dangerous.

That asymmetry should shape how you experiment. Display settings deserve free play: change five things, look, change them back. Policy settings deserve a quiet moment and a note to the team, because the next run produces something different for everyone.

What the Display Layer Actually Controls

Five tabs sit inside Configuration: General, Views, Appearance, Time and Schedule, and Manufacturing. The cards that earn their keep:

Bar readability. A visual minimum duration draws operations shorter than a set number of hours (1.0 by default) wide enough to stay clickable. Start and end times can be printed on each bar. The status color strip can sit at the top or the left. None of it touches the schedule data.

Operation labels. The label on each bar is built from a token pattern, per work center or applied to every work center at once, joined by a delimiter you choose. A pattern of job number, end product, and remaining hours answers most "what is this bar?" questions without opening anything. The label layer gets its own treatment in making the Gantt speak: colors, labels, and layouts.

Actual versus planned overlay. Actual start and end markers draw against the planned bar, with a variance flag when the difference passes a threshold and a highlight on started-but-unfinished work. Defaults: overlay on, variance flag on, threshold 30 minutes, in-progress highlighted in orange.

Time segments. Setup and queue time render as their own zones on the bar by default; teardown and move time are available and off by default. Setup can also be merged into the run segment for a cleaner bar.

Timeline range. How far the timeline scrolls, bounded by the earliest scheduled start and the latest scheduled end, with a buffer of extra weeks either side.

Interaction permissions. Checkboxes that enable or disable create, edit, delete, copy, drag, resize, dragging between work center rows, and multi-select.

Three buttons at the bottom matter as much as the cards: Reset to Defaults returns factory settings, and Import and Export move a whole configuration between machines as a file.

Trap One: The Shaded Work Hours Are Cosmetic

The day and week views shade a "work hours" region, defaulting to a business-day band. It looks authoritative. It is not: it is a display default and it does not feed the engine.

Real capacity comes from your shifts, and from any per-day or per-month capacity overrides on the work center. That is why a schedule can legitimately show work running outside the shaded band on a second-shift work center, and why widening the shaded region does not give you a single extra hour of capacity.

The symptom this creates is a good-faith one: a planner sees operations outside the shading, assumes the engine ignored the calendar, and opens a support case. The check that settles it in ten seconds is the shift definition on that work center, covered in EDGEBIC shifts and calendars explained.

Trap Two: Allow Conflicts Is Not a Capacity Check

The Appointment Permissions card includes an Allow Conflicts option, on by default. It is tempting to read that as "turn this off and the software will stop me overbooking a machine."

It will not. EDGEBIC's Gantt uses an override-and-warn model. Feasibility of a manual drag is the planner's call, and the next scheduler run resolves what the drag created. Turning off Allow Conflicts changes what the control permits visually; it does not add a capacity test to your drags.

That is a deliberate design position rather than a gap, and it is the same position most planners take in practice: a human who drags a job onto Tuesday usually knows something the data does not. What matters is knowing which model you are in, so nobody treats the absence of a warning as proof of feasibility. The finite-capacity math that does hold the line lives in the scheduling run itself, explained in finite vs infinite capacity scheduling.

If you genuinely need drags prevented, there are two honest levers: untick Allow Drag, or control the drag-reschedule right by role. The drag workflow itself, including its safety prompts, is covered in drag and drop rescheduling in EDGEBIC.

Trap Three: A Roll-Up Setting That Looks Like an Engine Setting

One option sits on the policy screen and behaves like a display setting, which is exactly why it confuses people: Primary hours only (exclude parallel), under Job-Level Hours.

Here is the arithmetic it fixes. Three mirrored drill heads run one operation as a dependent-parallel group. Between them they consume 24 machine-hours. The job itself took 8 hours of elapsed work, because the three ran simultaneously. Both numbers are true and they answer different questions.

Turn it on and totals count the primary path only, everywhere hours roll up: routing header totals, Job View, and reports. It applies immediately on the affected screens, and it moves no operations at all. It is a roll-up decision that happens to live on the policy tab because it needs to be consistent for everyone.

The tell that you need it: your job totals read roughly a multiple of what the shop floor reports on one cell, and that cell runs synchronized machines. See EDGEBIC parallel work centers explained for what makes a group dependent-parallel in the first place.

The One Interaction Setting Worth Getting Right

How Gantt edits are committed is a display-layer decision with real consequences.

The default batches your edits: drags and resizes accumulate as overridden changes and persist together when you click Save Changes. The alternative processes each edit individually, and a further option persists every drag immediately with no save click at all.

Keep the batch default on shared planning stations. Batch save plus review-before-commit is the standard pattern, and it is the reason an accidental drag is recoverable by simply not saving. Instant-persist belongs on single-purpose stations where every drag is deliberate.

The related warning setting, on by default, tells you after saving which jobs may have fallen out of sequence. Leave it on. It is the cheapest sequencing check in the product, and it pairs with the Gantt's safety prompts for prior operations.

Tune Once, Then Export

The single most useful habit on this screen has nothing to do with any individual setting.

Tune your display configuration until the Gantt reads the way your plant thinks, then click Export. That file rebuilds the whole configuration on a reinstall, on a second planner's machine, or on the training PC, in one action instead of forty clicks. The same applies to a customized on-screen label set through the Localization tab.

It also gives you a safe way to experiment. Export, change ten things, decide you preferred the old look, import. Reset to Defaults is the other escape hatch, and it always brings factory settings back.

Why the Split Exists at All

It would be simpler to put every setting in one screen. The reason not to becomes obvious the moment two people share a plan.

A schedule has two audiences with different needs. A planner building next week wants dense bars, setup segments visible, and the actual-versus-planned overlay switched on. A supervisor reading today's work wants big readable labels and nothing else. Those are incompatible screens of the same data, and the only way both people get what they need is if presentation is per user.

Meanwhile the engine's rulebook has to be the opposite. Direction, short-confirm handling, and sub-assembly explosion cannot be per user, because a plan computed two different ways is two plans. Site-wide is the only coherent scope for policy.

So the split is not tidiness for its own sake. It is the shape the problem actually has: the picture is personal, the plan is shared. Once a team internalizes that sentence, most configuration arguments end in ten seconds, because the question becomes "is this the picture or the plan?" and the answer decides both who owns the setting and where it lives.

Setting Up a Second Planner's Screen in Two Minutes

The practical payoff of a per-user display layer is that a new planner does not have to earn their screen through forty clicks.

1. On the tuned machine, open the Configuration tab and click Export. You get one file.
2. On the new machine, open the same tab, click Import, then Save and Apply Now Configuration.
3. If your plant renamed on-screen labels, export the label set from the Localization tab and import it the same way.

Two minutes, and the new planner sees the Gantt the way your plant reads it. That same file is your rollback: export before experimenting, import to undo. Reset to Defaults is the other escape hatch, and it always returns factory settings.

A Quick Diagnostic Table

When someone reports that "the schedule looks wrong", these four questions separate a display problem from a plan problem in under a minute:

Where to Go Next

Read EDGEBIC configuration options explained for the full map of settings, how to configure scheduling policy in EDGEBIC for the seven engine decisions, and configuration mistakes in EDGEBIC for the symptoms these traps produce in the wild. The whole product sits in the EDGEBIC complete guide.

Bring a screenshot of a Gantt your team finds hard to read to a demo of EDGEBIC, and we will reconfigure it live.