What Are Planned vs Actual Hours? EDGEBIC Definition

Planned vs actual hours is the comparison of the hours a schedule allocated to work against the hours actually logged, usually per work center per day, with the difference reported as variance. Planned hours come from the schedule; actual hours come from the shop floor. A machine planned for 8 hours that ran 9.5 has a variance of plus 1.5 hours, and that single comparison is the raw material behind adherence, earned value, and every "did the plan hold?" question a planner asks.

This entry is part of the EDGEBIC by User Solutions glossary series; for the broader vocabulary of planning, see the manufacturing glossary.

How Planned vs Actual Hours Works

Every scheduled operation carries a plan: the hours the engine allocated to it, broken out day by day. As the work runs, the floor reports what really happened: the hours actually spent. EDGEBIC keeps both on the same per-day, per-schedule record, so the plan and the reality sit side by side rather than in two systems that have to be reconciled. How mirrored parallel steps are counted when those hours roll up to the job is governed separately by the Primary Hours Only setting.

The comparison yields two views of the same gap. Variance is actual minus planned, in hours: positive means the machine ran longer than planned (overtime or an underestimate), negative means it ran shorter (finished early, sat idle, or the actuals were not fully logged). Adherence percent is actual divided by planned times 100, so a machine that ran 9 hours against 6 planned reads 150 percent.

The sign and size of the variance guide the response. A small negative is usually noise, a machine finishing a hair early. A large positive is worth chasing, because sustained overtime points to a routing that underestimates the work. And a large negative that contradicts what happened on the floor almost always means missing actuals, not idle capacity, since planned hours are written automatically while actual hours only appear when someone logs them.

A Concrete Example

Take a window from Monday June 16 through Wednesday June 18. The daily hour breakdown rows record:

Grouping by day and machine gives:

Mill-1 on June 16 merges the two schedules that share the same date and machine (8 + 4 planned, 7.5 + 4 actual). Its minus 0.5 variance is normal. CNC-1 on June 18 ran three hours of overtime, the row a planner would investigate: was the estimate low, or did something go wrong?

How EDGEBIC Computes and Shows Planned vs Actual Hours

The comparison surfaces in several reports, all reading the same daily breakdown data:

• The Daily Production report groups breakdown rows where actual hours are greater than zero by date and work center, then computes variance (actual minus planned) and adherence (actual divided by planned, capped at 200 percent). When a day is empty it points the planner to log actuals via the job Gantt.
• The Work Center Utilization report's Plan vs Actual tab gives one row per machine over a range: planned hours, actual hours, variance hours, variance percent, and days with activity, so a machine chronically over or under plan stands out across the period.
• The Planner tab's schedule adherence tile builds on the same idea at the operation level, comparing planned start against actual start.

Because actual hours depend on the floor reporting them, an accurate planned-vs-actual picture starts with disciplined data capture. Once operators log actual hours and pieces at the kiosk, the variance columns fill in and stop reading like phantom idle time.

Planned vs actual hours is the foundation the higher metrics stand on: earned value turns the same planned and actual hours into schedule and cost indices, and schedule adherence applies the plan-versus-reality idea to start timing. The EDGEBIC reports guide shows where each variance view lives, and the reports that answer "are we on time" connect hour variance to delivery outcomes. Where a routing demanded hours the schedule never booked at all, that gap is reported separately as lost hours in a production schedule.