What Is Partial Confirm Behavior in Scheduling?

Partial confirm behavior is the site-wide rule that decides what happens when an operator marks a step complete after logging fewer hours than the plan called for. It resolves the ambiguity in a short close-out: are the missing hours a real efficiency gain, a rounding gap at end of shift, or genuine work still to be done? The three policies answer differently. Trust Actual End takes the close-out as final and writes off the shortfall. Forward Shift Remaining reschedules the unlogged hours onto a future slot. Trust Unless Flagged trusts most steps but reschedules the shortfall only on steps a planner has flagged as sensitive.

This entry defines partial confirm behavior and shows how it behaves inside EDGEBIC by User Solutions. For the wider index of planning terms, see the manufacturing glossary, and for the state a short close-out leaves a job in, read what is a partial completion in scheduling.

How it works

The situation is common: a step is planned for eight hours, the operator logs seven, and then presses complete. The plan and the reality disagree by an hour. What should the schedule do with that hour? Partial confirm behavior is the plant's standing answer, applied consistently so the schedule does not depend on who happened to close the job.

Under Trust Actual End, the operator's word is final. Done means done; the missing hour is written off as the job simply taking less time than estimated. This keeps the schedule calm and avoids churning the plan over small gaps, at the cost of quietly losing any hours that really did represent unfinished work.

Under Forward Shift Remaining, the default in most setups, the engine assumes the unlogged hours still have to happen. It takes the shortfall and reschedules it onto the next available slot, so the remaining work stays visible on the plan. This keeps the schedule honest about outstanding work, at the cost of moving the plan whenever a close-out rounds short.

Trust Unless Flagged is the hybrid. Most steps are trusted, like Trust Actual End, so ordinary rounding gaps do not disturb the plan. But steps a planner has explicitly flagged as sensitive are treated like Forward Shift Remaining: their shortfalls are rescheduled. That lets a plant be forgiving where forgiveness is safe and rigorous where a missing hour genuinely means missing work.

A concrete example

Consider a precision grinding step planned for eight hours and a paint step planned for four. An operator closes the grinding step after logging six hours, and closes the paint step after logging three and a half.

Under Trust Actual End, both close-outs are final. The two missing hours of grinding and the half hour of paint are written off, and the schedule moves on. Under Forward Shift Remaining, both shortfalls are rescheduled: two hours of grinding and half an hour of paint are placed on the next available slots. Under Trust Unless Flagged, only the grinding step, flagged as sensitive because a shortfall there usually means unfinished precision work, has its two hours rescheduled; the paint step's half hour, on a forgiving step, is trusted and written off. The hybrid gets the safe outcome on each: no churn on the forgiving paint step, no lost work on the critical grinding step.

How EDGEBIC uses it

EDGEBIC holds partial confirm behavior as a single site-wide policy, changed in the schedule policy settings and read fresh on every scheduling run, so a change needs no restart. The three values, Trust Actual End, Forward Shift Remaining, and Trust Unless Flagged, apply to every short close-out consistently.

For the hybrid policy, individual routing steps carry a short-confirm flag. When the site policy is Trust Unless Flagged, only steps with that flag set have their shortfalls forward-shifted; the rest are trusted. That per-step opt-in is what lets a plant tune rigor step by step rather than choosing one blanket rule for everything.

Whatever the policy, completed work stays immutable to the rescheduler. Partial confirm behavior governs only the gap between planned and logged hours, and any hours it forward-shifts are placed as new future work rather than as a rewrite of recorded actuals. So the actuals a plant has captured are always preserved, and the policy decides only how the unlogged remainder is handled on the next run. To see the job state a short close-out produces, read what is a partial completion in scheduling. For how the engine preserves recorded work when it replans, read what is actuals preservation on reschedule. And for where operators enter these close-outs, see what is a shop floor kiosk.