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Insights on production scheduling, lean manufacturing, and manufacturing software from 35+ years of industry experience.
Everything we have published.
Fishbowl to EDGEBIC: The Data Mapping Reference
Fishbowl data export scheduling field by field: map parts, bills of material and manufacture orders into EDGEBIC masks, with conversions and upsert rules.
Good, Scrap, and Rework Counts Explained in EDGEBIC
The kiosk counts good, scrap, and rework pieces separately, and each scrap carries a reason. Learn where each count goes and why only good pieces feed the plan.
How a Build-to-Stock Job Replenishes Inventory
How a build-to-stock job replenishes inventory: the job as a supply event that lifts the projected balance, when it lands, and how it clears a below-safety warning.
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.
How a Stable Near-Term Schedule Frees Your Supervisors' Hours
Every reshuffle of today's plan costs a supervisor real minutes reassigning people and machines. A frozen near-term window and stable schedules give those hours back.
How a Greedy Schedule Leaves Capacity on the Table
A greedy scheduler commits each job's whole routing before it looks at the next one. Here is exactly how that myopia idles a work center, and how optimization recovers it.
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.