What Is the Schedule-At-Utilization Setting?

Schedule-at-utilization is a per-order percentage that caps how much of a work center's available capacity a single order may consume, defaulting to 100. At 100 the order uses the full capacity it needs; set lower, say 80, and the order may take only 80% of a work center's capacity on any day, leaving the rest open for other work. It is a per-order lever for reserving headroom, applied on the manufacturing order rather than on the work center.

This entry is part of the EDGEBIC glossary; see the manufacturing glossary for the wider vocabulary and the scheduling policy definition for the site-wide defaults this per-order setting sits under.

How Schedule-At-Utilization Works

When the engine schedules an order, it draws hours from each work center the order routes through. By default it takes whatever capacity the order needs, up to what the work center has, which is the 100% behavior. Schedule-at-utilization changes that ceiling for one specific order.

At a lower percentage, the order is only permitted to consume that fraction of a work center's daily capacity. An order capped at 80% may take at most 80% of a cell's hours on any day it uses that cell; the remaining 20% is off-limits to it and stays available for other jobs. The order does not run any slower on the machine; it simply spreads across more days because it is allowed less per day.

The setting is per order, which is its whole point. Two orders sharing the same work center can have different caps: a routine large order held to 80% to preserve headroom, and a normal order left at 100%. The engine applies each order's own percentage as it schedules, so the reservation is targeted rather than a blanket rule on the cell.

Why Cap an Order Below 100%

Running every order at full capacity sounds efficient, but on a shared work center it can starve everything else. A single large order left at 100% can consume a cell's entire day, and every shorter or higher-priority job behind it waits.

Capping the large order guarantees a slice of daily capacity stays open. Set it to 80% and one-fifth of each shared cell's day is reserved for whatever else arrives: a rush order, a quick rework, a hot customer request. The large order finishes a little later in exchange for keeping the plant responsive. It is a deliberate trade of throughput on one job for flexibility across the book, and it is the setting a planner reaches for when one order threatens to monopolize a resource.

On a dedicated cell that runs only one job, the setting simply leaves capacity idle, so it earns its keep specifically on shared work centers.

There is a subtlety worth naming: capping an order below 100% does not make it lower priority, it makes it less greedy. A high-priority order can still be scheduled first and still be held to 80% of each shared cell, which lets a lower-priority but urgent job slip into the reserved 20% behind it. Priority decides the order in which jobs are placed; schedule-at-utilization decides how much of each cell a placed job is allowed to take. The two levers combine: use priority to decide who goes first, and the utilization cap to decide how much room the first job leaves for everyone after it.

A Concrete Example

A prototype order routes through a machining cell that is also used by regular production. Left at 100%, the prototype would take the cell's full day and push the regular orders out.

The planner sets the prototype's schedule-at-utilization to 60%. Now the prototype may consume at most 60% of the cell's daily capacity, and the other 40% stays open for regular production to keep flowing. The prototype spreads over more days than it would at full capacity, but the regular orders are no longer blocked behind it. If the shop later needs the prototype sooner, raising the percentage lets it take more of the cell per day and finish faster, at the cost of the headroom. The number is the dial between speed for one job and room for the rest.

How EDGEBIC Applies Schedule-At-Utilization

In EDGEBIC by User Solutions, schedule-at-utilization is a field on the manufacturing order, defaulting to 100 (full capacity). You set it per order to whatever percentage of a work center's capacity that order is allowed to consume. The engine reads it during scheduling and caps the order's daily draw on each cell accordingly.

Keep it distinct from a work center's reported utilization, which is an outcome you read after a run, not a cap you set before one. To see how full your cells actually ended up, use the work center utilization report. To set the per-order cap in practice, see how to schedule a job to start at a specific utilization, and for the broader capacity and instance setup, configuring instances and utilization.

Reserving headroom this way is one facet of finite capacity scheduling, where the plan respects real limits rather than assuming infinite machines; for that foundation, see finite versus infinite capacity scheduling.

Set it once per order when you know a job will compete for a shared resource, and leave it at 100 when the job has a cell to itself. Most orders never need it; the ones that do are usually the large, capacity-hungry jobs that would otherwise dominate a bottleneck.

Schedule-at-utilization is how you tell the engine "let this order take the whole cell" or "hold some back for everyone else," one order at a time. On a shared bottleneck, that single percentage is often what keeps the plant from choking on its biggest job.