What Is a BOR Work Center Type in a Routing?

A BOR work center type is the setting on a routing step that decides how the machines assigned to that step participate in scheduling, taking one of three values: normal, independent parallel, or dependent parallel. It is a property of the step, not of the machine, which is the distinction that trips people up most often. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions the step-level type is what turns a plain single-machine operation into a parallel one.

How it works

Normal is the default and covers the vast majority of routing steps. The step names one work center, the scheduler finds capacity there, and nothing else is involved. If the step also lists fallback machines, those are handled by a separate mechanism and do not change the step's type.

Independent parallel means the step's work is spread across several machines that each check and consume their own capacity. Each machine takes a share of the hours and runs at its own pace, so a large lot clears faster than it would on one machine. The catch is that the scheduler insists on a window where every machine in the group is free at the same moment. It will not start one machine alone and let the others catch up.

Dependent parallel means the secondary machines mirror the primary. They take the primary's start and end verbatim, and their capacity is not independently checked, because physically they are one operation. This is the setting for equipment that moves together: multiple spindles on a shared gantry, paired presses, synchronized heads. The hours on each mirrored machine can be scaled by a factor, but the timing never diverges from the primary.

The spellings in the product carry a long-standing quirk from the original engine, so you will see the parallel values rendered without an extra vowel in some places. They mean exactly what they read as. What matters is that this setting lives on the routing step and answers "how does this operation behave", while the work center's own type answers "what kind of resource is this machine", with values such as production, assembly, quality, shipping, and maintenance.

A concrete example

Picture a recipe card where each row names a station and a duration. A normal row reads "Step 3, oven, bake 45 minutes", and one oven does the work.

An independent parallel row is closer to "Step 3, bake 200 trays, and you may use any of the three ovens." Each oven takes a share, they all start when all three are free, and the batch clears in roughly a third of the time. If one oven is tied up, the whole bake waits, because the plan is written around all three running together.

A dependent parallel row is different again. It reads "Step 3, bake on the triple-deck oven." There are three chambers, but they are one appliance with one door and one timer. You do not schedule them separately, and you cannot use deck two for something else while deck one runs. The two lower decks mirror the top deck exactly, and the schedule shows all three occupied for the same window.

Same word, parallel, but two genuinely different physical situations, and the step-level type is where you say which one you have.

How EDGEBIC uses it

The type is set on the routing step in the BOR editor, and the machines the step runs on are configured alongside it. Setting up a step for either parallel mode is covered in how to configure parallel and alternate work centers in EDGEBIC.

The two parallel modes have their own glossary entries, because the behaviors are substantially different: see independent parallel processing for the shared-load model and dependent parallel processing for the mirrored model. Choosing between them is walked through in dependent vs independent parallel, when to use each.

Do not confuse this with the machine record's own classification, which is a separate glossary term: work center type. A step's parallel behavior and a machine's functional category are independent settings, and editing one never changes the other. For the wider vocabulary, see the manufacturing glossary, and to see parallel routings inside a live plan, explore EDGEBIC.