The Status Strip and the Legend on the EDGEBIC Gantt

Two small pieces of the EDGEBIC scheduler Gantt carry more reading load than anything else on the screen: the status strip on each bar and the legend strip above them. One tells you which job a bar belongs to at a glance, the other tells you what every color on the chart means, and it is generated from your own configuration rather than a manual. Get both right and the board becomes self-documenting.

This post covers what each does, the settings that shape them, and the small set of bar-level display options that sit alongside. For the full state vocabulary the legend describes, pair this with making the Gantt speak with colors and labels in EDGEBIC by User Solutions.

The Status Strip: Following One Job Across Lanes

Each operation bar can carry a thin color band, and its position is set by Status Bar Position (top by default). It is a narrow strip on purpose, because it is meant to be read peripherally rather than studied.

What makes it powerful is Use Status Bar Colors, which is on by default. With it on, the strip is colored per job number from a hundred-color palette instead of a small stock set. The practical result: a job running through saw, mill, deburr, paint, assembly, and test carries the same strip color on all six lanes. Your eye follows the job across the plant without reading a single caption.

That solves a specific problem. Bar body colors already carry the operation state (planned, in progress, saved, flagged for review), so they cannot also carry job identity. The strip is the second channel. State on the body, identity on the strip.

Three ways to focus a job, in increasing strength:

The Legend: Generated, Not Documented

The legend strip sits at the top of the Schedule View Gantt, and its defining property is that it is generated from the same operation-state configuration that paints the bars. Change a state's color and the legend changes with it. Switch a state off entirely and it leaves both.

That single design decision removes an entire class of confusion. There is no printed color key to go stale, no wiki page to fall behind, and no argument about whether amber means what it meant last quarter. If you want to know what a color means on your board, the answer is above your board.

It also sets the rule for reading anyone else's material, including this one: match bars to your legend, not to a screenshot from another site. Every color here is configurable, and plants do configure them.

One state sits slightly outside the system and is worth calling out to new readers. Completed is not a state color but an opaque shade painted over whatever color the bar had. It appears in the configuration list and in the legend like the others, but it behaves as an override, because "this is finished" should never be ambiguous.

The Bar-Level Options That Sit Alongside

A short list of display settings shapes how much each bar says before you even get to captions.

Show Op. Start/End Times prints the operation's start and end directly on the bar. It ships off, because the caption is usually the better home for that information: the caption pattern is set per work center and can carry planned dates, actual and remaining hours, percent complete, and roll-up totals per work center or per job. That token language is covered in reading operation description fields on a Gantt bar.

Use Target Date Block hatches the target-date region on in-progress bars, so an operation running against a target reads differently from one simply running.

Use Delayed Start uses the delayed-start date as the bar's visual left edge where one is available.

Extend Op. if below Hours widens bars shorter than a threshold (1.0 hour by default) so they stay clickable. It is display only, and it is the answer to "why does that twelve-minute inspection look like an hour."

Op. Desc. Delimiter sets the separator between caption fields, a pipe character by default. Small setting, real effect on legibility once a lane carries four tokens.

A Configuration That Reads Well

If you want a starting recipe that survives contact with a real morning meeting:

1. Keep the shipped state colors for two weeks. Teach the vocabulary before repainting it.
2. Leave Use Status Bar Colors on. Job tracing across lanes is the single biggest readability win available.
3. Keep Show Op. Start/End Times off and put the information you actually need into the caption pattern instead, per work center.
4. Change at most two state colors, and announce which. The legend will already agree with the bars; your people need the announcement, not the chart.
5. Export the tuned configuration and import it on every planning station, so two machines never disagree about what a color means.

Why the Small Parts Matter Most

A Gantt earns its wall space when a supervisor reads plant status from across the room. Bars do the broad strokes. The status strip answers "whose work is that," the legend answers "what does that color mean," and captions answer "how many hours are left." None of those three questions should require opening a report.

That is the practical form of what visual production scheduling is for, and it is the habit User Solutions has been building with manufacturers since 1991, in ten-person shops and in organizations including the US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, and Cummins. Plants improve when everyone reads the same picture the same way.

See the full EDGEBIC platform, start from the visual scheduling pillar guide, or bring a photo of your current wall chart to a demo and let US show you the same information in states, strips, and a legend that maintains itself.