What Is a Reschedule in Production Scheduling?

A reschedule is recomputing the schedule for one or more manufacturing orders, preserving completed work and picking up from the current state of the floor. It is how a plan stays honest as reality diverges from it: a machine breaks, a rush job arrives, an operation runs long, and the schedule is regenerated so the remaining work reflects what has actually happened. The defining rule is that completed work is never moved. Only the unfinished work is replanned, from the point each job currently stands.

This entry defines rescheduling and shows how it behaves inside EDGEBIC by User Solutions. For the wider index of planning terms, see the manufacturing glossary, and for how finished steps are protected during a run, read what is actuals preservation on reschedule.

How it works

The everyday version is a moving company replanning the truck route after a traffic jam blocks the original road. The stops already made stay made; the driver does not un-deliver a couch. The route is recomputed only for the deliveries still ahead, around the new obstacle. Rescheduling a plant works the same way: history is fixed, and the engine reshapes the future.

To do that, a reschedule first reads the current state of each job. Steps with a recorded actual start and end are complete and locked. A step with a start but no end is in progress. Steps with no actual dates are still ahead. The engine preserves the completed and in-progress work, adjusts the job's effective start to where it actually left off, and reschedules the remaining steps forward from there. If every step of a job is already done, the reschedule simply keeps it as it was.

Rescheduling also comes in modes that trade stability for optimization. Replanning everything from scratch gives the cleanest plan but disturbs the whole floor. Replanning only new orders leaves the existing plan untouched. Preserving a near-term frozen window and replanning the rest is a middle path that keeps the immediate days stable while re-optimizing further out. The mode you pick decides how much the plan is allowed to move.

A concrete example

A job has seven steps. The first three, cut, drill, and machine, are complete with real actual dates, and the machining ran two days late. Steps four through seven, deburr, inspect, assemble, and test, have not started.

A reschedule preserves steps one through three exactly as they happened, including the late machining. It then sets the job to resume from the actual end of step three and replans steps four through seven forward from that point. The deburr step that was originally planned for last Wednesday now lands after the real machining finish, and the downstream steps follow. The completed work is unchanged, the historical record is intact, and the new finish date honestly reflects the two-day delay rather than pretending the job is still on the original schedule.

How EDGEBIC uses it

EDGEBIC rescheduling analyzes each job's actual dates, preserves what is complete, and replans only the remaining steps from the current state. When a reschedule runs, the engine detects completed and in-progress steps from their recorded actuals, holds them immutable, adjusts each job's resume point, and reschedules the unfinished work forward within finite capacity. Completed steps are never moved, so a reschedule can never rewrite history.

The mode is selectable to match the situation. A full reschedule replans all jobs from scratch after a major change. An incremental-new run adds only newly entered orders to the existing plan. An incremental-all run replans all unstarted jobs plus new ones. A smart incremental preserves jobs within a near-term freeze window and replans the rest, which is the tool for keeping the floor stable while still re-optimizing the horizon. A frozen window and a disciplined reschedule cadence together hold down schedule nervousness, the churn of jobs moving without a real cause.

To see exactly how completed work is held during a run, continue with what is actuals preservation on reschedule. For the mode choices in detail, read what is a scheduling mode. And for the finite engine that every reschedule runs through, see what is advanced planning and scheduling.