Why Overdue Orders Pile Into Today's Planning Bucket in EDGEBIC

In EDGEBIC by User Solutions, overdue open orders, both incoming supply and committed demand, clamp into today's planning bucket instead of staying in the past where they were originally due, so nothing an open order represents can vanish into a history bucket you cannot act on. The visible effect is a first bucket that sometimes shows a surprisingly large receipt or demand figure, and once you know why, that pile-up becomes a useful signal rather than a puzzle.

This post explains the clamping rule, why it exists, and how to read and clear the backlog it exposes. For how the projected balance rolls across buckets, see reading a projected available balance row by row, and for the wider loop start from the EDGEBIC planning guide.

The Clamping Rule

A planning bucket is a slice of time: a day, a week, or a period. Each open order carries a date that places it in a bucket, a completion date for a build-to-stock order, a due date for a firm demand order. When that date is in the future, the order sits in the bucket the date falls into.

When the date is in the past and the order is still open, EDGEBIC does something deliberate. It clamps the order into today's bucket. An overdue build-to-stock order shows as a scheduled receipt in the current bucket. An overdue make-to-order order shows as firm demand in the current bucket. The order does not stay in the past bucket where its original date landed.

This applies to every overdue open order, on both sides of the plan. Supply and demand both roll forward to today.

Why the Past Cannot Hold an Open Order

The reason is how EDGEBIC treats the past. A bucket that ends entirely before today is a history bucket, and history buckets use only what actually happened, the real recorded movements, not the plan. The forward-looking model, with its scheduled receipts and firm demand, only governs today and later.

So if an overdue open order were left in a past bucket, it would fall into a region of the calendar that ignores the plan. It would be invisible. You would have a real, open, late order that no working view surfaced, which is exactly the order you most need to see. Clamping it into today keeps it in front of you, where you can reschedule, expedite, or cancel it.

The design choice is blunt and correct: an open order never disappears into history.

Reading the Pile-Up

The practical consequence is that today's bucket can show a figure larger than any single order. When you see it, read it as a backlog, not a single event.

Suppose the first bucket shows scheduled receipts of 900. You know no one order is that big. What you are seeing is several overdue build-to-stock orders, each due before today and still open, clamped together and summed into the current bucket. The same happens on the demand side: an unexpectedly large firm-demand figure in today's bucket is usually a cluster of overdue orders that were due last week or earlier.

To resolve it, drill into the order grid and filter to open orders with due or completion dates before today. Those are the individual jobs adding up to the pile-up. Now you can act on each one.

A Worked Example: Six Late Builds in One Column

Say you open the calendar for a stocked part and today's bucket shows scheduled receipts of 900 against a normal weekly demand of 120. The number looks wrong until you understand the clamp.

The part had six build-to-stock orders, each for 150 units, all due across the previous two weeks, and all still open because the shop fell behind. None completed, so each is overdue. EDGEBIC clamps all six into today's bucket, and six times 150 is 900. That is the entire figure.

The projected balance in today's bucket now assumes those 900 units arrive, so it reads optimistically high. The goods are not on the shelf. Your job is to make the plan honest: confirm each overdue order's real status, reschedule the ones that will complete soon to realistic near-term dates, and expedite or cancel the stuck ones. As each order picks up an honest completion date, its receipt moves out of the pile and into the bucket where supply actually lands. The 900 spreads back into real dated supply, and the projected balance stops overstating what you have.

The Habit This Builds

Once you read the first bucket as a backlog indicator, it becomes one of the fastest health checks on the calendar. A clean first bucket means overdue orders are under control. A swollen first bucket, on either side, means orders are late and clustered, and it points you straight at the drill-down that lists them.

Treat the clamp as a feature, not a distortion. It refuses to let a late order hide in the past, which is precisely what you want from a planning view. Keep overdue orders rescheduled to honest dates and the first bucket stays a true picture of today.

For how the plan and the past split at the today boundary, read reading history buckets, actuals versus plan, and to see how a stockout surfaces ahead of time, read how a stockout shows up before it happens. For the general practice of finite planning, see what is finite capacity planning.