Blog
Insights on production scheduling, lean manufacturing, and manufacturing software from 35+ years of industry experience.
Everything we have published.
How a Schedule Handles a Shift That Crosses Midnight
A night shift that starts in the evening and ends after midnight spans two calendar dates. Here is how EDGEBIC computes the shift's true end, places work across the day boundary, and attributes the hours correctly.
How a Work Center Group Re-Shops Machines on a Reschedule
A group step keeps its pool binding after the first schedule, so a reschedule can re-shop the machines. Started operations keep the machine they ran on, and only not-started ones re-resolve. Here is how EDGEBIC does it.
How Capacity Is Computed for a Work Center, Shift, and Day
The exact formula EDGEBIC uses to turn a shift into available hours: base shift time minus downtime and holidays, scaled by utilization and instances, minus what is already booked and any late-start penalty.
How Efficiency Scales Run Time but Not Setup
A faster or slower machine changes how long the parts take to make, but not how long the changeover takes. Here is why EDGEBIC applies a factor to run hours only, and why a true alternative works differently again.
How Move and Teardown Time Fit Into a Schedule
Beyond setup and run, a routing step can carry move hours and teardown hours. Here is what each represents, how they extend an operation's footprint, and when to bother modeling them.
How Queue, Flow, and Transit Stack After an Operation
Between one operation ending and the next beginning, EDGEBIC layers three different delays in a fixed order: queue time, lot-streaming flow, and transit days. Here is how they compose and where they interact.
How Setup Time Composes Into a Step's Duration
How EDGEBIC folds a fixed setup and a per-piece run rate into one operation's total hours, why setup is charged once while run scales with quantity, and what that means for batch sizing.
How the Scheduler Sequences Orders Before Placement
Before EDGEBIC places a single operation, it decides the order in which whole jobs get first claim on capacity. Here is the global sort, why it is deterministic, and how it differs from dispatch rules at the machine.
How the Setup Time Resolver Picks a Changeover Time
A single operation can draw its setup from six different places. Here is the precedence ladder EDGEBIC walks to decide which one wins, from a sequence matrix down to the work center default.
Critical Ratio Scheduling Explained
Critical ratio scheduling ranks jobs by time remaining divided by work remaining, so the job most behind pace runs first. See the formula, worked numbers, and how it fits a finite plan.
Earliest Due Date vs Shortest Processing Time
Earliest due date protects deadlines, shortest processing time maximizes throughput. Compare the two dispatch rules with worked numbers and see when each one wins.
How a Fractional Machine Count Schedules a Half-Speed Unit
How EDGEBIC models a work center with 2.5 instances, redistributing the partial machine's capacity so a half-size mixer or slower backup unit schedules without over-counting.