Blog
Insights on production scheduling, lean manufacturing, and manufacturing software from 35+ years of industry experience.
Everything we have published.
Does a Multi-Day Operation Set Up Again Each Day?
Why setup is incurred once at the start of an operation, not repeated each morning a multi-day run continues, and how that differs from a changeover between two different operations.
Earliest Start vs Earliest Completion Machine Selection
The three strategies EDGEBIC uses to pick a machine from a pool or alternate list, why earliest start and earliest completion can disagree, and the day-granular quirk that decides the winner.
Efficiency vs Utilization: Two Different Capacity Dials
Why efficiency and utilization are separate things in EDGEBIC: one scales the run time of the work and is set per pool member, the other scales the hours a work center offers and is shaped through the calendar.
How a Job's Hours Roll Up From the Schedule Graph
How EDGEBIC totals a job's planned, actual, and remaining hours from the placed schedule rows, why it excludes sub-assembly and parallel duplicates, and why the order estimate is the wrong source.
How a Multi-Day Operation Spreads Hours Across Days
How EDGEBIC attributes the hours of an operation that spans several shifts to each calendar day, and why that daily breakdown drives load reports, capacity checks, and actuals comparison.
How a Sub-Assembly Feeds Its Parent Job
How EDGEBIC schedules a multi-level routing where a sub-assembly must finish before its parent operation can start, and how the sub-assembly's hours roll up into the job total.
How a Work Center Inherits or Overrides Its Calendar
How EDGEBIC lets a work center use the plant's global shifts and holidays or define its own, and why that inherit-or-override choice decides when the capacity search finds open time.
What Each Scheduling Mode Rebuilds
The five EDGEBIC scheduling modes decide which orders a run touches and which existing capacity it keeps: new-only, full reschedule, all unstarted, smart incremental, and single-job, with worked outcomes.
Why the Continuous-Process Flag Lives on the Machine
Why the continuous-process setting is a property of the work center, not the routing, how it selects the lot-streaming model, and the anomaly that flags a model mismatch.
How a Daily Capacity Override Replaces the Formula
Sometimes a shift's real capacity for one date is not what the standing formula computes. Here is how EDGEBIC lets a per-date override replace the calculation outright, and why the same number drives both the schedule and the dashboard.
How a Job Sticks to the Same Machine Instance
When a work center has several identical machines, EDGEBIC prefers to keep one job on the same instance across shifts and days. Here is why that continuity matters and when the engine relaxes it.
How a Material Step Schedules as an Instant Gate
Material lines in a routing consume no machine capacity, yet they still control when the next operation can start. Here is how EDGEBIC treats a material step as an instant gate on the timeline.