What Is Days Late on a Job? EDGEBIC Definition and Formula

Days late is the whole number of days between the scheduled end of a job's last operation and its due date, counted only when the gap is positive. It measures the plan rather than the floor: a job is days late the moment the current schedule lands past the promised date, whether or not a single hour has been logged against it. EDGEBIC by User Solutions computes it as the latest scheduled end across all of a job's operations minus the due date, and surfaces it as the sort key of the Late Jobs report.

This entry is part of the EDGEBIC glossary series introduced on the platform overview; the wider index of planning vocabulary sits in the manufacturing glossary. It sits alongside job status, which classifies where a job is in its lifecycle rather than how far past its date it lands.

How Days Late Works

The useful mental picture is a satnav rather than a stopwatch. Before you have driven a single mile, the route already projects an arrival time, and you can compare that projection against your dinner reservation. Days late is that comparison. It does not require anything to have happened yet, and it changes the moment the route changes.

The arithmetic is deliberately blunt. Take every scheduled operation on the job, find the latest scheduled end among them, subtract the due date, and truncate to whole days. That single number carries the whole answer because the job cannot be finished before its last operation is.

Two consequences of the formula catch people out.

Only positive values are reported. A job whose plan meets or beats its date has a negative or zero result and is dropped from the Late Jobs report entirely. That is why the report is short even in a busy shop, and it is a feature: the report is a work queue, not a census. If you want the signed figure for every job, the Job Progress and Sales Order Progress reports carry a days-versus-due column instead, where a negative value means the plan finishes early.

It is a plan measure, not a delivery measure. Days late says nothing about whether work started, whether anyone is behind, or whether the customer will actually be disappointed. Those are separate questions answered by percent complete, by the status column, and by the delivery-ready date. Keeping them separate is what makes each one readable.

A Concrete Example

Take a snapshot on June 20 with three jobs in the system.

J-203 has a scheduled end two days before its due date, so its result is negative and it never reaches the report.

J-201 and J-202 both compute to 7 days late and both appear. They are tied on the sort, and they need completely different responses. J-201 has at least one operation started and no matching completion, so its status reads "In progress"; at 45 percent complete and more than five days late it earns the blocker hint "significantly behind plan". J-202 has no actual start anywhere, so its status reads "Not started" and, with percent complete under one, its hint reads "no actuals, never started".

Same number, two situations. J-201 is a finishing problem on a job that is moving. J-202 is a starting problem, and its 7 days will become 8 tomorrow and 9 the day after, without anybody doing anything wrong.

How EDGEBIC Uses Days Late

Days late is the organizing principle of the Late Jobs report, which is reached from the reports catalog and takes no date range because it is a snapshot of the plan as it stands. The grid arrives sorted by days late descending, so the worst job is the first row, and it carries the due date, the scheduled end, percent complete, a status, and a blocker hint on each line.

Three behaviors are worth holding onto:

• The number moves when you reschedule. Because it reads the plan, recording real overtime as a capacity change and re-running the schedule is the honest way to close a gap between the report and a supervisor's confidence.
• The signed variant lives elsewhere. Job Progress and Sales Order Progress show days versus due for every job, negative when the plan finishes early, which is the right column for a general health scan rather than a work queue.
• Delivery-ready dates can differ from scheduled ends. A product with an end-item lead time, the cure, ship or delivery tail that follows the last operation, becomes deliverable later than its last machine finishes. Surfaces that classify against the delivery-ready date therefore judge lateness against a slightly later moment than the raw scheduled end used here.

The walkthrough for running the report, reading the blocker hint, and choosing which rows to act on first is in how to run the Late Jobs report.