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 Shared Schedule Reduces Key-Person Risk
When the schedule lives in one veteran planner's spreadsheet, the whole plant depends on that person. A shared scheduling model turns tribal knowledge into a system.
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 Supervisor Corrects a Kiosk Punch in EDGEBIC
A bad punch is never edited in place. See how a supervisor corrects kiosk hours, pieces, or a reason code with an append-only adjustment that keeps the original record intact.
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.
How an Operator's Hours Are Attributed to a Job in EDGEBIC
Every kiosk punch carries the operator's name. See how one person's productive hours are attributed to a job and summed across a shift, and why setup and downtime stay out of it.
How Backward Scheduling Trims Finished-Goods Inventory
Finish jobs too early and you pay to store them. Backward scheduling times each job to its due date, cutting the days finished goods sit waiting to ship.
How Fast You Answer a Customer Date Change
When a customer moves a due date, the shop that answers in minutes keeps the order. A live scheduling model turns a date-change request into a same-call answer.