Blog
Insights on production scheduling, lean manufacturing, and manufacturing software from 35+ years of industry experience.
Everything we have published.
How a Job Resumes From Where Actuals Left Off
How EDGEBIC uses recorded actuals to compute a resume point, schedule only the remaining hours of a part-finished step, and queue the rest of the job behind it.
How a Reschedule Frees Stale Capacity Reservations
Why EDGEBIC releases a rescheduled job's not-yet-started reservations before re-planning, so old slots do not block the new plan and push steps needlessly late.
How a Routing Graph Orders Steps for Scheduling
How EDGEBIC turns a routing's step links into a dependency graph, topologically sorts it, and makes each step wait for the latest predecessor to finish.
How a Scheduler Chooses Between Alternate Machines
When a step can run on more than one machine, the scheduler picks by strategy: earliest completion, primary first, or earliest start, adjusted by each machine's speed factor. See the logic with numbers.
How a Scheduler Handles a Re-Entrant Routing
A re-entrant routing visits the same work center more than once. See how a finite scheduler treats each visit as a separate claim on the shared capacity pool, with worked numbers.
How a Scheduler Trades Off Setup Against Due Date
Grouping like setups saves changeover hours but can push a job past its due date. See how a scheduler weighs setup savings against lateness, with worked paint-booth numbers.
How a Work Center Group Shops a Pool of Machines
How EDGEBIC explodes a routing step bound to a work center group into a primary plus alternates, lets the resolver pick the best member, and re-shops the pool on every run.
How Anchor Buffers Protect a Constraint and a Due Date
How EDGEBIC sizes the constraint, feeding, and shipping buffers around an anchored bottleneck, when they are demand-proportional, and when they are small fixed values.
How Dependent-Parallel Mirroring Locks Machines Together
How EDGEBIC schedules synchronized multi-machine operations by mirroring a parent machine's exact timing onto its partners, scaling hours by a factor without moving the clock.
How Independent Parallel Splits a Job Across Machines
How EDGEBIC runs several machines on one operation at once, finding a moment when all can start together and consuming each machine's capacity independently to finish faster.
How One-Per-Day Dedicates a Machine for a Full Day
How EDGEBIC's one-per-day flag makes each instance of a furnace or paint booth take a single job for the day, and when to use it instead of pooled capacity.
How Shift Priority Scoring Orders the Capacity Search
How EDGEBIC ranks candidate shifts when placing an operation: an immediate-start bonus, an available-capacity term, and an earlier-shift nudge, all deterministic.