What Is the Next Step Start Date in Rescheduling?

The next step start date is the earliest moment a job's remaining operations may begin, computed from what the shop floor has already recorded. It is the resume point: the boundary between work that has happened and work still to be planned. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions every reschedule derives it before placing a single remaining operation, and it becomes the job's effective start time for that run.

How it works

A reschedule starts by classifying every operation the job already has. Three categories matter.

A step with both an actual start and an actual end is completed. Its actual end is the moment work genuinely left that station, and it contributes that date.

A step with a start but no end is in progress. It cannot contribute an actual end because none exists, so the engine projects one. It takes the hours logged so far, subtracts them from the step's planned hours, and works out when the remainder finishes. That projected end is what the step contributes.

A step with no actuals at all contributes nothing, unless it sits before a later logged step, in which case it is treated as an inferred completion and its dates are backfilled first.

The next step start date is the maximum across that whole set. Maximum, not the last one in sequence, because a job can have several branches running at once and the remaining work has to clear all of them. Taking anything less than the maximum would place an operation before something it depends on has finished.

Once computed, this value replaces the job's start time for the run. Every capacity search, machine selection, and validation downstream then uses it as the earliest-start constraint, which is what makes the whole remaining plan consistent rather than partially anchored to a release date that no longer means anything.

A concrete example

A moving company plans a route on Monday morning and hits a road closure at noon. Re-planning the rest of the day does not start from the depot at eight in the morning, because the truck is not there any more. It starts from where the truck actually is at the moment the re-plan happens.

A job works the same way. Suppose a four-step job was released to start Monday at eight. Steps one and two are complete, finishing Wednesday at two in the afternoon rather than the planned Tuesday. Step three is in progress, started Wednesday afternoon with four of its six planned hours logged, so its projected end is Thursday morning.

The resume point is Thursday morning, because that is the latest of Wednesday at two and the Thursday projection. Step four is then planned from Thursday morning, not from Monday, and not from Wednesday either. Its earliest start reflects the last thing still moving.

If the engine kept using the Monday release date, it would search for capacity in a window the job has already lived through and produce a plan that contradicts the rows sitting right next to it on the board.

How EDGEBIC uses it

The resume point is computed once per job per reschedule, before any remaining operation is placed. Completed and in-progress rows are preserved verbatim rather than re-planned, which is the rule described in actuals preservation on reschedule and in why actuals are immutable in EDGEBIC.

Seeing the resume point in action on a real job, including what happens when the shop is further along than the plan assumed, is walked through in how a job resumes from where actuals left off. The practical steps for lining a plan up with the floor are in how to resume a job from where the shop actually is in EDGEBIC.

Steps missing their own actuals still count toward the resume point when a later step is logged, because the engine treats them as an inferred completion and backfills their dates first. Which operations are re-planned at all also depends on the run's scheduling mode. For the wider vocabulary, see the manufacturing glossary, and to see a reschedule pick up from the shop floor, explore EDGEBIC.