What Is a Margin Bucket in Job Status? EDGEBIC Definition

A schedule-margin bucket sorts each active job into one of four slices, Late, Overdue, On time, or Early, by how much slack its plan has against the due date. It is about schedule margin, meaning time cushion, not profit margin. Every active job (any manufacturing order not yet completed) lands in exactly one bucket, so a planner reads the health of the whole order book in a single glance at the job status donut.

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

How the Margin Buckets Work

The classifier looks at three dates for each active job: the due date, the scheduled end (the plan), and the actual end if the job has finished. From those it assigns exactly one bucket, by priority so no job is double-counted.

The distinction between Late and Overdue is the subtle part. Late is a planning problem: the schedule itself will miss the date, or the job already finished late. Overdue is an execution problem: the plan was feasible, but the due date slid past with work still open. Coloring them differently (red versus amber) keeps those two very different causes from blurring together.

One thing the buckets deliberately do not encode is whether a job is physically running. That used to be a "partial complete" slice, but it only ever fired for started-but-healthy jobs and hid schedule slack, so EDGEBIC dropped it. A job being underway now shows as a separate In progress badge on the active jobs list, leaving the buckets purely about margin.

A Concrete Example

Picture four active jobs classified against today's date:

• J-A: due Friday, plan finishes Wednesday, not started. Plan has slack, due date open, so Early (teal).
• J-B: due Friday, plan finishes Friday exactly, not started. No slack but not missing, so On time (green).
• J-C: due last Monday, plan finished last Sunday, still open today. Plan beat the due date, but the due date has passed unfinished, so Overdue (amber).
• J-D: due Friday, plan finishes the following Tuesday. The plan itself overruns the due date, so Late (red), flagged now even though Friday has not arrived.

The donut shows one red, one amber, one green, one teal slice, and the active jobs list sorts worst-first (Late at top), so the jobs needing attention sit where a planner looks first. J-D is the instructive case: it is flagged Late today, before its due date, because the plan already cannot meet it. That early warning is the whole value of classifying against the plan rather than waiting for the calendar.

How EDGEBIC Computes and Shows It

The margin buckets drive the Job Status donut on the Capacity tab's Active Alerts panel, built over active jobs only through a pure, unit-tested classification function. A few product behaviors:

• Each job lands in exactly one slice, chosen by priority (Late, then Overdue, then On time, then Early), so the counts always sum to the active job total.
• Classification uses the delivery-ready end, the scheduled end plus the product's end-item lead time, so the donut agrees with the Drive Schedule grid's days-late column and does not call a job on time when its shipping lead time pushes it past the due date.
• In progress is a badge, not a bucket. A physically started job carries an In progress badge on the active jobs list while still sitting in its margin slice.

The buckets share a lineage with the other delivery signals: they classify against the plan the same way schedule adherence classifies start timing against plan, and they feed the same on-time story the reports that answer "are we on time" tell in report form. The EDGEBIC dashboards guide shows how the donut sits among the cockpit's other panels, and the reasoning behind planning to a due date is covered in forward versus backward scheduling.