What Is Production Activity Control (PAC)?

Production activity control, abbreviated PAC, is the shop-floor execution layer of manufacturing planning: it dispatches work to stations, monitors progress, and reports actual performance against the plan. It is the difference between writing the recipe and actually cooking, watching the pot, and recording how long the dish really took. PAC closes the loop between the schedule on paper and what the floor actually did, and EDGEBIC fulfills that role through its dispatch report and shop-floor kiosk.

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

How Production Activity Control Works

PAC is the last stage of the classic planning hierarchy. Material planning decides what to make, capacity planning checks whether it fits, scheduling arranges it in time, and then production activity control takes over on the floor. Its job is execution and measurement, not planning.

Three activities make up PAC. Dispatching hands each work center an ordered list of the operations it should run, so the supervisor knows what comes next rather than guessing. Monitoring tracks those operations as they move through the shop, catching when a job starts, how it is progressing, and when it completes. Reporting captures the actuals, the real hours worked and pieces produced, so the plan can be compared against reality.

That reporting step is what makes PAC a loop rather than a dead end. A schedule created once and never checked against the floor drifts out of date the moment the first job runs long. By feeding actuals back, PAC lets each replan start from what genuinely happened, keeping the plan and the shop aligned over time.

A Concrete Example

Picture Mill-1 at the start of a shift. Without production activity control, the operator works from memory or a stale printout, and no one records how long anything really took. The schedule on the planner's screen slowly diverges from what the floor is doing.

With PAC in place, the supervisor prints a dispatch list for Mill-1: "today you run Job 42 Step 3, then Job 57 Step 1." The operator runs Job 42 Step 3, and when it finishes an hour later than planned, that actual time is recorded. The reporting step captures the overrun. When the planner reschedules, the engine treats Job 42 Step 3 as complete and does not move it, and it starts Job 42's next operation from the real finish time rather than the original estimate. The dispatch that follows reflects the shop as it actually is.

How EDGEBIC Uses It

EDGEBIC provides the two halves of production activity control directly. On the dispatch side, its work center dispatch report gives each station the ordered run queue a supervisor prints for the shift, so the floor always knows what to run next in the sequence the engine chose. On the reporting side, its shop-floor kiosk lets operators log actual starts, hours, and pieces as work happens, capturing the reality that feeds the loop.

Those actuals do more than record history. Because a reschedule never moves completed or in-progress work, the recorded actuals become fixed points that the next planning run builds around. An operation that ran long pushes its successors from the real finish time; an operation that finished early frees its window sooner. Either way, the regenerated schedule reflects what the shop actually did rather than an assumption, which is exactly the alignment PAC exists to provide.

The result is a planning system that does not stop at the plan. See the dispatch mechanism in the work center dispatch list entry and how the floor records reality in the actuals tracking guide.

Related Reading

PAC turns a schedule into an executed plan; the dispatch half is covered in what a work center dispatch list is, and the generic shop-floor view is at the dispatch list glossary. For the planning steps that precede execution, see what production scheduling is.