What Is a Monthly Capacity Override in Scheduling?

A monthly capacity override is a planner-entered value that replaces the shift-formula capacity of a work center across a date range, with lower priority than a daily override. Where the standard capacity of a cell comes from the shift calendar, a monthly override lets a planner say, for a whole span of dates, "use this figure instead." It is the coarse-grained tool for a sustained change: an entire month at reduced hours, entered once, rather than the same edit repeated on thirty separate days.

This entry defines the monthly capacity override and shows how it behaves inside EDGEBIC by User Solutions. For the wider index of planning terms, see the manufacturing glossary, and for the single-day sibling, read what is a capacity override.

How it works

Capacity for any work center, shift, and date cell is resolved by a fixed priority order. First the engine looks for a daily capacity override on that exact cell. If none exists, it looks for a monthly capacity override whose date range covers that day. If neither exists, it falls back to the shift-formula calculation, which derives hours from the shift template, the number of instances, and the availability percentage. The most specific entry wins: a single date beats a month, and a month beats the default.

The monthly override sits in the middle of that chain on purpose. It is broad enough to cover a sustained condition without tedious repetition, yet it yields to a daily override whenever a particular day needs a different value. This lets a planner lay down a month-wide baseline and then pin exceptions on individual days, confident that the specific always overrides the general.

Crucially, an override never rewrites the underlying shift calendar. It is a bounded substitution that applies only within its date range and only to the work center it names. Outside the range, the standard capacity returns automatically. And because the same resolution chain feeds both the scheduling engine and the capacity dashboards, what the planner sees on the calendar is exactly what the engine schedules against.

A concrete example

Suppose a press line is being run by a partially trained crew for the whole of July while the regular operators are on rotation. The formula says each day is worth eight hours, but the trainee crew realistically delivers six. Rather than open thirty-one daily cells and type six into each, the planner enters one monthly capacity override across the July range with a value of six hours.

Now every July day reads six hours instead of eight, and the scheduler plans the press accordingly, spreading jobs to fit the reduced pace. Midway through the month, the regular crew returns for a single high-priority day and the press can run its full eight hours. The planner adds one daily capacity override on that date with eight hours. Because the daily override outranks the monthly one, that day reads eight while the rest of July still reads six. One broad rule, one precise exception, no cell-by-cell drudgery.

How EDGEBIC uses it

EDGEBIC treats capacity as a resolved value rather than a fixed formula, and the monthly capacity override is one tier of that resolution. A planner enters it for a work center and shift across a date range through the capacity screens, and from then on every day in the range uses the entered hours instead of the formula, unless a daily override on a specific day says otherwise.

Because the override is read by the same capacity resolver the engine uses, a sustained change flows straight into scheduling. A month of reduced hours narrows the available capacity the scheduler can book, so jobs naturally spread out to respect the real pace rather than the theoretical one. Setting the hours to zero for a range blacks out those cells entirely, which is how you model a work center being down for an extended period without touching its shift template.

The layering with daily overrides is what makes the feature practical. Broad conditions live in the monthly tier; day-specific exceptions live in the daily tier; the shift formula catches everything else. A planner never has to choose between a coarse tool and a fine one, because the priority chain lets both apply at once, with the finer entry always winning where it exists. When an override lands on a day the work center has no regular shift on, the scheduler creates a synthetic shift slot to hold the hours, which is how a weekend override becomes bookable at all. To see the single-day tool this one layers beneath, read what is a capacity override, and for the availability percentage the formula uses when no override applies, read what is the schedule-at-utilization setting. For how the engine turns capacity into placed work, see what is advanced planning and scheduling.