What Is Teardown Time in a Routing?

Teardown time is the cleanup and dismantling time at the end of a routing step, removing the fixture, breaking down tooling, and clearing the machine, and in EDGEBIC it is counted in a job's total-time and cost estimate rather than reserved as capacity in the plan. It captures the real cost of ending a job without necessarily blocking the next one.

This entry defines teardown time and shows how it reads inside EDGEBIC by User Solutions. For the wider index of terms, see the manufacturing glossary; for the closely related transport field, see what is move time in a routing; and for the practical setup, see how to add teardown time to a routing step in EDGEBIC.

How it works

A routing step carries several time fields, and teardown time is the one for post-run activity: dismantling the setup, cleaning, and returning the machine to a neutral state. It is declared on the step in hours.

What matters is how the engine treats it. Teardown time is included when a step's total time is calculated, which is used for cost purposes, but it is not consumed by the capacity allocation that produces the schedule. In other words, it raises the estimated total time and cost of a step without, on its own, moving the bars in the plan. Setup and run time drive the capacity picture; teardown captures cost.

This split is intentional. On many shops the teardown of one job overlaps the wait or transport before the next job starts, so charging its cost is right while blocking capacity for it would double-count. If you genuinely need dismantling to delay the next step, you model that with a scheduling field such as queue time.

A concrete example

Think of a caterer clearing tables after an event. The teardown, stacking chairs, boxing linens, wiping down, is real labor you bill the client for. But the next event is booked at another hall, so the cleanup does not push the next event later; it just adds to the cost of this one. Teardown time in a routing works the same way: it is billed into the job's cost, not stacked onto the schedule.

Take a step with 4 hours of run time, 1 hour of setup, and 0.5 hours of teardown. The total time for costing is 5.5 hours, so the labor cost reflects all of it at the work-center rate. But the capacity the engine reserves is driven by the run and setup, so the downstream step is not pushed out by the half hour of teardown. The cost is complete; the plan stays clean.

How EDGEBIC uses it

In EDGEBIC, teardown time is a field on the routing step that flows into the step's total-time roll-up and therefore into job and quote costing. A step that carries teardown time reports a larger total and a higher labor cost, so quotes and cost comparisons stay honest about the work of ending a job.

Because it is a cost and estimate field rather than a capacity driver, adding teardown time will not surprise you by shifting the schedule. That predictability is the point: you can cost teardown accurately without worrying that every cleanup entry ripples through the plan. When you do need dismantling to actually gate the next operation, you reach for queue time, which the engine composes into step end times.

To see the other routing time field with the same cost-only behavior, read what is move time in a routing; for the report that tells a planner up front which routing values the scheduler never reads, read what is a dead-field check in scheduling; to add it in practice, read how to add teardown time to a routing step in EDGEBIC. For the general concept of a routing, see routing.