A reason stamp is the event of attaching a reason code to a punch, and it comes in exactly two kinds: a pause stamp on a down, idle, or rework punch, and a scrap stamp on a run punch that is recording rejected pieces. The stamp is the moment the why is captured. EDGEBIC by User Solutions treats it as its own event so the reason can be routed to whoever should respond, not just filed for a report.
How it works
A punch records what an operator did: started, paused, resumed, completed. A reason code records why. Those are separate pieces of information, and they arrive at different moments, which is why the attachment of one to the other is worth naming.
The pause kind fires when a down, idle, or rework punch has its reason code set through the pause picker on the kiosk. The operator has already told the system that production stopped. The stamp is the follow-up answer to what caused it: broken tooling, no blanks, waiting on an approval.
The scrap kind fires on a punch that is still running. Production has not stopped, but parts have been rejected, so the punch records a scrap piece count and a scrap reason code together. Nothing pauses. The machine keeps cutting. What changed is that some of the output will not ship.
Keeping the two kinds distinct matters more than it first appears. Downtime analysis and quality analysis answer different questions and have different owners, and folding scrap into the same bucket as pauses makes both harder to read. An hour lost to a hydraulic fault and eleven parts lost to a bad lot are not the same kind of loss, even when they happen on the same machine in the same hour.
The second half of the mechanism is routing. A stamp can notify one of three roles: maintenance for machine fault escalation, the production lead for material or waiting issues, and the quality inspector for quality-related pauses. That mapping is what converts a captured reason into a response. Without routing, a reason code is a research tool. With it, the picker on the kiosk becomes the fastest way for an operator to get the right person to the station.
A concrete example
Think of the difference between a fire alarm and the incident report someone writes afterward. Both record that there was a fire. Only one of them brings the fire brigade. A reason stamp is meant to be the alarm, and the report is a free byproduct of having sounded it.
Put that on a floor. At 10:05 the operator on Press-1 hits pause and picks broken tooling from the picker. That is a pause stamp with a machine-family reason, and it routes to maintenance, who can be walking before anyone tells them by radio. At 10:20, on the mill next door, a run punch records eleven scrap pieces against a material defect reason. That is a scrap stamp. The mill did not stop, so nobody would have raised it by voice, but the reason is now attached to that job at that time and the quality inspector has been told.
By the end of the week the same two events also serve the reporting side. Press-1 shows an hour of machine-family pause time, and the mill shows eleven rejected pieces tied to a lot rather than to the machine. Neither number needed anyone to reconstruct it from memory, because both were captured at the moment they were true.
Compare that with the plant where reasons are added the next morning. The pause is still there in the data, but the reason is a guess, no one was notified at the time, and the eleven scrap parts are a line on a tally sheet with no job, no hour, and no cause.
How EDGEBIC uses it
The pause stamp is produced by the reason picker on the shop floor kiosk: see how to pause a job with a reason code for the operator workflow and the EDGEBIC shop floor kiosk explained for the surrounding station design. The punch that the stamp lands on is defined in what is a punch type.
The code itself and its family are separate glossary terms: what is a reason code covers the specific label, and what is a reason category covers the four-value grouping that makes a long code list reportable. Building a list that people will actually pick from is covered in building a reason code catalog for your work centers.
On the scrap side, the counts feed quality reporting: see good, scrap, and rework counts explained and what is quality rate in OEE. If a stamp was applied to the wrong punch or the wrong code was picked, the correction path is what is a punch adjustment.
A reason stamp is the difference between knowing what happened and being able to do something about it while it is still happening. For the wider vocabulary, see the manufacturing glossary, and to see reasons captured against a live schedule, explore EDGEBIC.
Expert Q&A: Deep Dive
Q: Our operators pause jobs but never pick a reason, so the downtime report is a single unlabeled bucket. How do we fix the habit?
A: Treat the pause picker as part of the pause rather than as paperwork after it. The stamp is what carries the reason code onto the punch, so a pause without a stamp is a punch with no why attached and there is nothing to report on later. Two things usually fix the habit. First, keep the code list short enough that picking is faster than skipping, which is a catalog problem rather than a discipline problem. Second, make the routing visible: once operators see that picking a machine fault actually brings maintenance to the station, the picker stops feeling like data entry and starts feeling like the fastest way to get help.
Q: We record scrap at the end of the shift on a paper tally. Is the scrap stamp worth switching to?
A: The value is not the count, it is the pairing of the count with a reason at the moment the parts were rejected. An end of shift tally tells you that eleven parts were scrapped somewhere in eight hours. A scrap stamp on the run punch tells you eleven parts were scrapped at 10:20 on this job at this work center for this reason, which is enough to connect it to a tool change, a material lot, or a specific operator handover. It also keeps the scrap reason separate from pause reasons, so machine downtime analysis and quality analysis do not contaminate each other in the same bucket.
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