Blog
Insights on production scheduling, lean manufacturing, and manufacturing software from 35+ years of industry experience.
Everything we have published.
How to Return a Work Center to the Global Shift Calendar in EDGEBIC
Put a machine back on the plant calendar in EDGEBIC by re-ticking Use Global Shifts. What happens to its custom shifts, how the badge changes, and what to check before you reschedule.
How to See One Work Center's Schedule in EDGEBIC
Open the Workcenter Details tab in EDGEBIC to read a single machine's schedule, export it to Excel for the floor, and set bottleneck anchors on the jobs it carries.
How to Set a Work Center Effective Date in EDGEBIC
Set an effective date on a work center in EDGEBIC so a machine you have not commissioned yet can be routed today and only offers capacity from the day it arrives.
How to Tell Whether Anything Is Actually Hosting Your Syncs
A healthy idle integration host writes no run rows, so run history cannot tell you whether anything is running. What the liveness beacon reports, including from workstations that host nothing.
How to Turn Off a Plant Holiday Without Deleting It in EDGEBIC
Untick Active on a plant holiday in EDGEBIC to stop the scheduler honoring it while keeping the record. When to deactivate, when to delete, and what changes on the next run.
How to Turn Off Lot Streaming on a Step in EDGEBIC
Return a routing step to strict serial flow in EDGEBIC by zeroing Transfer Batch and Flow Step. What comes back, what queue time does next, and how to confirm the overlap is gone.
I Changed a Step's Required Skill and the Operator Pin Stayed
Changing a step's required skill keeps its operator pin, so a pinned person who lacks the new skill stops the next scheduling run. Why that is deliberate, and the fix.
Keeping a Change Log of Import Mask Edits
An import mask edit overwrites the old mapping with no history. Here is the one-line-per-change log that explains a shifted hour total six months later, and what belongs in it.
My Optimizer Proposal Disappeared Before I Could Accept It
An optimizer proposal lives only on your screen until you Accept, so closing the app discards it and a colleague never sees it. Why that is safe, and how to work with it.
Onboarding a Second Plant Into the Same EDGEBIC Database
A rollout sequence for adding a second plant to a live EDGEBIC model: retrofitting site prefixes, ordering the imports, running parallel for a week, and what breaks if you skip a step.
Earned Value Mid-Job: Ahead of Schedule and Over Budget at Once
A worked earned value example on a five-step job: BAC 50 hours, AC 55, SPI 1.09 and CPI 0.91, and what to do when the two indices point opposite ways.
Reading the EDGEBIC Scheduling Session Log
The scheduling session log is the third diagnostic surface: a decision-by-decision trace of one scheduling run. What it records, how to read it, and when to switch it off.