What Decides Which Operations Appear on the EDGEBIC Gantt

The EDGEBIC by User Solutions schedule board shows a filtered picture of your plan, not every scheduled operation in the database. That is deliberate: an unfiltered board on a real plant is unreadable within a week of go-live. But it means "the operation is not on the Gantt" is not the same statement as "the operation is not scheduled," and knowing the difference saves a lot of confused searching.

This post lists the gates an operation has to pass to draw a bar, in the order worth checking them, plus the settings that change how a bar looks without changing whether it exists. For the wider tour of the surface, start with the visual scheduling guide.

Gate 1: The Engine Has to Have Scheduled It

The board draws scheduled operations. If a routing step was never scheduled, there is nothing to draw, and no display setting will conjure it.

This sounds obvious and it is still the first thing to rule out, because the two situations look identical on screen. A job that failed to schedule, a job that was added after the last run, or a routing step added to a job's own copy after the schedule was produced all leave the board looking incomplete. The tell is that the operation is missing everywhere, not just in one view.

If the whole board is empty rather than one operation, that is a different problem with its own checklist.

Gate 2: The Job Has to Be Checked

The left panel lists every job with a checkbox, and only checked jobs draw bars. Every job starts checked the first time you open the board, and after that your selection is preserved while you work and across a refresh.

This is the single most common cause of a "missing" operation, and it has a distinctive signature: the job disappears from every lane at once. One operation gone is usually a horizon or duration problem. A whole job gone is almost always its checkbox.

Two conveniences worth knowing. There is a search box for finding a job number in a long list, and a control to re-check everything when you are done narrowing. If you check a job whose operations were not already loaded, they are fetched on demand rather than requiring a full reload. The full mechanics are in filtering the Gantt to the jobs that matter.

Gate 3: The Operation Has to Fall Inside the Horizon

The board opens on a date window, not on all time. An operation scheduled outside that window is real, holds its slot, and is invisible.

Right-click an empty area of the Gantt for the navigation commands:

Long jobs are where this bites. A routing that runs for three months puts its final operations well past the default right edge, and a planner who has not met the horizon commands reads that as missing work. The zoom side of the same menu is covered in zooming the Gantt timeline.

Gate 4: The Job Type Has to Be Set to Display

Capacity-request jobs are placeholders for load you want reserved without committing a real routing to a specific machine, and whether they appear in the job list and on the board is a configuration setting.

That produces a legitimate and confusing situation: two planners looking at the same plan on differently configured stations see different boards. Neither is wrong. Decide as a site whether capacity requests belong on the board, then share one tuned configuration across stations, as described in sharing a Gantt configuration across planners. Capacity-request jobs also behave differently under a drag, which is one of the documented reasons a bar will not move.

A second display setting controls whether operations with no net requirement are drawn. Sites that generate them routinely usually suppress them, because a board full of zero-duration markers is noise. Sites that want to see everything the engine emitted turn them on.

Gate 5: The Operation Has to Have a Duration

A bar needs width. An operation whose end is at or before its start has nothing to draw, and the board enforces a one-minute minimum so a malformed row cannot blank the whole chart.

The underlying cause is almost always a routing step with both per-unit hours and setup time set to zero, which produces a genuinely zero-duration operation. That is a data problem rather than a display problem, and it has its own fix, covered in a job showing a zero-length bar. If a step really is instant, it belongs as a material step rather than a timed work-center step.

Settings That Change the Bar, Not Its Existence

Three more settings shape what you see without deciding whether you see it. Confusing this group with the gates above sends people looking for the wrong fix.

Extend Op. if below Hours widens bars shorter than a threshold, one hour by default, so a twelve-minute inspection stays clickable. It is purely visual: the allocated hours and the real start and end are untouched. This is the answer to "why does that short operation look like an hour," covered in extending short operation bars.

Use Delayed Start uses the delayed-start date as the bar's visual left edge where one is available, which changes where a bar begins on screen.

The lead-time tail goes the other way: it adds something that is not an operation at all. A product carrying an end-item lead time gets a slate band after the job's last operation, spanning the gap to the job's availability date. It consumes no capacity and cannot be dragged, which is the point. See the lead-time tail bar.

A Two-Minute Diagnostic

When an operation is not where you expect it, work down this list rather than guessing:

1. Is the job checked? If the whole job is gone from every lane, stop here.
2. Is the horizon wide enough? Press Horizon End Later twice and look again.
3. Was the job scheduled at all? Check that the job appears in the schedule, not just in the order list.
4. Is it a capacity-request job on a station configured to hide them? The job list will be missing it too.
5. Does the step have hours? A zero-hours, zero-setup step produces a zero-duration operation.
6. Is it there but tiny or shifted? Then it is a display setting, not a missing bar.

Filters Are Why the Board Stays Readable

None of this changes the plan. Every gate here is presentation: the engine's schedule, the capacity it consumed, and the reports built on it are identical whether a bar is drawn or not. What filtering buys is a board a supervisor can read from across the room instead of a wall of overlapping bars.

That readability is the entire argument for visual production scheduling over a printed list, and it is what User Solutions has been building with manufacturers since 1991, in small shops and in organizations including the US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, and Cummins.

See the full EDGEBIC platform, or bring your busiest week to a demo and watch the same plan go from unreadable to obvious with three checkboxes.