What Each Segment of a Gantt Bar Means in EDGEBIC

A bar on the EDGEBIC scheduler Gantt is not one undivided block of time: it can be drawn as an anatomy of setup, run, queue, teardown, and move segments, each with its own toggle and color. Once you can read the segments, a bar stops saying "this machine is busy Tuesday" and starts saying "this machine spends four of those hours changing over." That is a different conversation, and a more useful one.

This post walks the segments in order, explains where each one's number comes from in the routing, and covers the display settings that decide which parts you see. It assumes you already know the basics of the chart from the visual scheduling pillar guide in EDGEBIC by User Solutions.

The Bar Is the Allocation; the Segments Are the Story

Start with the rule that prevents every misreading: the bar's total span is what the scheduling engine allocated for that operation. Segments divide that span into readable parts. They never add or remove time, and switching a segment off does not hand capacity back to the machine.

That matters because the segment toggles live under Configuration on the Schedule View, in the Manufacturing tab's Setup & Queue Time card, alongside color pickers. Everything in that card is presentation. The numbers behind it come from the routing, where they were set once and are consumed by the engine on every run.

Setup: the Segment Worth Arguing About

Setup is drawn at the front of the bar in its own color, and it is the segment that changes behavior fastest once people can see it. A milling step with one hour of setup and six hours of run reads as mostly run. A paint step with four hours of color-change setup and three hours of run reads as mostly changeover, and that picture is exactly the argument for sequencing light colors before dark ones.

Two controls shape it. Show Setup Time decides whether the segment renders at all. Combine Setup with Runtime merges setup into the run for a cleaner bar, which is the right choice on lanes where setup is a rounding error and the wrong choice anywhere changeover drives the sequence.

If your site uses sequence-dependent setup, the setup a bar shows is the one the engine actually resolved for that position in the queue, not a flat routing constant. That is precisely why the segment is worth watching: it moves when the sequence moves.

Run: What the Bar Is Nominally For

The run segment is the productive middle. Its length is hours per unit times quantity, which is why a bar's width is a quantity statement as much as a time statement. Two bars of equal length on the same machine can represent very different orders once setup is split out of them.

One display caveat prevents a classic misread. Extend Op. if below Hours (1.0 by default) draws bars shorter than the threshold wider so they stay clickable. A twelve-minute deburr will occupy about an hour of screen width. The schedule data is untouched, and the operation description fields are the honest source for actual hours, which is one more reason to put hour tokens on your bars as described in reading operation description fields on a Gantt bar.

Queue: the Buffer You Configured on Purpose

Queue time is a shift-aware buffer attached to a step, and EDGEBIC renders it as a zone before the operation it protects. Cooling, inspection hold, and cure time are the usual reasons a routing carries one.

The important reading habit here is that a visible queue zone is a configuration, not a scheduling failure. Space between operations has several possible causes, and queue is only one of them: transit days, shift calendars, and weekends all open gaps too. That distinction is worked through in why there is a gap between two bars.

There is one interaction worth memorizing. When a step also carries a lot-streaming gate (a transfer batch or a flow step), the streaming gate becomes the successor's start rule and the queue on that same step stops having an effect. If you expect a cooling zone and do not see one, check whether that step is streaming.

Teardown and Move: Off by Default for a Reason

Show Teardown Time and Show Move Time ship off. Teardown draws after the operation; move draws as transport between operations. Turn them on when your routings genuinely carry those values and someone makes decisions with them, such as a fixture strip-down that ties up the machine after the last piece.

Turning them on across a plant that leaves both at zero adds nothing but visual noise. Restraint is the whole art of a readable chart, and the same discipline applies to bar captions and state colors, discussed in making the Gantt speak with colors and labels.

Reading a Bar in Practice

Take a paint operation on 100 units: 4.0 hours setup, 0.30 hours per unit, and a 2.0 hour queue after it, on a day shift running 08:00 to 16:00.

1. The bar's total run allocation is 4.0 setup plus 30.0 run, which is 34.0 hours of work. Because the day shift holds 8 hours, the bar spans several days and skips the weekend. Multi-day spans are covered in how the Gantt shows a job spanning shifts.
2. With Show Setup Time on, the first 4.0 hours draw in the setup color. A supervisor sees at a glance that half of Monday is changeover.
3. The 2.0 hour queue draws as a zone protecting the next operation, so the assembly bar does not appear to start unreasonably late.
4. If someone later adds a transfer batch to the paint step, the queue zone stops driving the successor and the assembly bar pulls earlier, overlapping paint. That overlap is intended behavior, not a defect.

Four readings, one bar, and no report opened.

A Chart That Explains Itself

Segment display is a small setting with a large teaching effect. When setup is visible, sequencing conversations start on their own. When queue is visible, nobody files a ticket about a gap that a routing deliberately created. When teardown stays hidden because nobody uses it, the chart stays legible.

User Solutions has been building scheduling pictures for manufacturers since 1991, for shops of ten people and for organizations including the US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, and Cummins. The recurring lesson is the same one this post makes concrete: a schedule people can read is a schedule people follow, which is the whole point of production scheduling in the first place.

See the full EDGEBIC platform, or bring one crowded work center to a demo and let US show you what its bars look like once setup stops hiding inside the run.