What Is a Daily Hour Breakdown? Definition and Example

A daily hour breakdown is a per-day record of the planned hours and actual hours, and where relevant the pieces, for one scheduled operation, so an operation that spans several days is reconciled day by day rather than as a single lump. It is a daily timesheet for one step: Monday, welding, planned 8 hours, actual 7.5 hours, 150 pieces. Where the schedule row says the operation runs from Monday to Wednesday, the daily hour breakdown says how those hours are distributed across the three days and how many were actually worked on each.

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

How a Daily Hour Breakdown Works

Capacity is consumed one shift, one day at a time. A machine has eight hours on Monday and eight on Tuesday, not sixteen hours in a single bucket. So when a 20-hour operation spans several days, the scheduler needs to know how many of those hours land on each day, both to load each day's capacity correctly and to give the floor a day to log actuals against.

The daily hour breakdown is that record. Each row belongs to one operation and one date, and it carries the planned hours for that day and the actual hours once they are logged. On work centers measured in output, it also carries pieces. When an operation spans two shifts in a single day, a per-shift sub-row can further decompose the day.

The breakdown is where planned and actual meet at the finest grain. A reschedule recomputes the planned rows; the floor writes the actual rows. Reconciling the two, day by day, is what tells you which specific day a long job fell behind and by how much, rather than only that the whole operation ran long.

A Concrete Example

A 16-hour CNC operation is planned to run Monday and Tuesday. Its daily hour breakdown starts as two planned rows:

The operator logs the real work as it happens. By Tuesday evening the breakdown reads Monday 8 planned / 6 actual, Tuesday 8 planned / 4 actual: 16 planned against 10 actual. The plant can now see exactly where the shortfall sits and reconcile it. If the operator then marks the step complete with 6 hours unlogged, the site's partial-completion policy decides whether those hours forward-shift to a new slot or the short close is trusted. Either way the two logged days keep their real numbers.

How EDGEBIC Uses It

In EDGEBIC the daily hour breakdown backs the Log Actuals grid and every hours rollup.

• It reconciles long operations day by day. Each day the operation touches has a row with planned and actual hours, so a multi-day job is loaded and logged against the right dates rather than as a single block.
• It carries the auto-filled marker. When the system back-fills a day's actuals from plan because a downstream step was closed first, the row is tagged and shows an auto-filled badge in the grid, which disappears the moment you edit the value.
• It rolls up cleanly. The end-of-day rollup recomputes daily breakdowns so job-level and work-center-level hour totals come from real daily data.
• It is protected by anomaly checks. The persist boundary deduplicates daily rows so a reschedule cannot create duplicate or stray rows, and the anomaly report flags any day carrying actual hours with zero planned hours, or duplicate rows for the same operation and date, and a consistency drift check catches allocation hours and daily breakdowns disagreeing about the same number.

The daily hour breakdown sits one level below actual dates: the actual dates bracket the operation, and the breakdown fills in what each day held. The actuals tracking explained walkthrough shows how a shift's punches become the day's hours, and what is production scheduling sets the hours loop in context.