What Is a Column Glossary in Reporting? EDGEBIC Definition

A column glossary is built-in documentation for every column in a report: its plain-language definition, its formula, its unit, concrete examples, and where the number comes from. Instead of shipping a separate manual that drifts out of date, each EDGEBIC report carries its own dictionary, so a planner who does not recognize a column reads its meaning in place through a Column Details button. It is what makes the reports self-explaining rather than cryptic grids of abbreviations.

This entry is part of the EDGEBIC by User Solutions glossary series; for the broader vocabulary of planning, see the manufacturing glossary.

How a Column Glossary Works

A production report is dense: SPI, CPI, BAC, PV, EV, VAC, adherence, availability, and a dozen more, often abbreviated to fit a grid. To a seasoned analyst those are second nature; to a new planner or a supervisor pulled in to cover, they are a wall of jargon. A column glossary closes that gap by attaching a definition to every column the report shows.

Each glossary entry is structured, not a loose tooltip. It holds the column's field name, its display name, the full expansion of any abbreviation, a one-line description, a self-contained paragraph written for someone with no background in the term, the formula, the unit, three worked examples, links to related columns, and the source where the value is computed. The examples are the highest-value part: each pairs a literal value with a one-sentence interpretation, so "0.75" reads as "behind: earned 75 percent of what should have been earned by now" rather than an abstract definition.

The related-column links form a small knowledge graph. Reading about SPI points you to CPI and Estimate at Completion; reading about on-hand stock points you to safety stock and reorder level. That lets a planner follow the thread from one metric to its neighbors without hunting through a manual.

A Concrete Example

A planner opens the Earned Value report, sees SPI 0.75 for a job, and does not know what it means. They click Column Details and select the SPI row. The definition panel fills in:

• Full name: Schedule Performance Index
• Formula: EV divided by PV
• Unit: ratio
• Examples: 1.00 means on schedule; 0.75 means behind, earned 75 percent of what was planned by now; 1.15 means ahead, 15 percent over plan.
• See also: Planned Value, Earned Value, Cost Performance Index.

In a few seconds the planner has gone from a mystery number to an action: this job has earned only three-quarters of the value the plan expected by today, and the related-terms links invite a look at CPI to check whether cost is a problem too. No separate document, no guessing, no interrupting a colleague.

The same dialog serves cost columns (CPI's examples run 1.00 on budget, 1.10 under, 0.82 over), inventory columns (on-hand shows 250 available, 0 nothing on hand, minus 30 over-issued), and every other pane, each with its own dictionary tailored to that report.

How EDGEBIC Provides Column Glossaries

Every EDGEBIC report pane that carries a glossary exposes a Column Details button. Clicking it opens a master-detail dialog: the columns list down the left, and the selected column's definition, formula, unit, examples, related terms, and source on the right. The dialog opens with the first column already selected, so the panel is populated immediately.

The system is deliberately one source of truth. The same structured definitions that fill the in-app dialog are designed to be served to future integrations and AI assistants verbatim, so the answer a planner reads in Column Details is the same answer any connected tool would give. That is what keeps the documentation from drifting: there is no second copy in a manual to fall behind the report.

Twenty-plus reports ship with their column glossary today, covering Earned Value, OEE, utilization, late jobs, on-time delivery, work-center dispatch, the setup matrix, and more. The full picture of how this makes the reports self-documenting is in EDGEBIC self-explaining reports, the pane-by-pane catalog is in the EDGEBIC reports guide, and the delivery-focused subset is walked through in the reports that answer "are we on time".

A column glossary turns a report from something you have to be trained to read into something that teaches you as you use it, which is the difference between a metric that sits unused and one a planner acts on the first time they see it.