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Insights on production scheduling, lean manufacturing, and manufacturing software from 35+ years of industry experience.
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A Booking Falls Outside Its Shift Hours
When an operation's clock window runs outside the shift's working hours, a work-center shift override or a changed shift is usually the cause. Align the hours and re-run.
A Booking Points to a Machine Unit That Is Gone
An orphan instance booking references a machine unit that was removed after scheduling. Restore the unit or re-run the schedule so the engine picks a live instance.
A Job Shows a Zero-Length Bar on the Gantt
A zero-width or backwards schedule bar means the operation has no duration: the usual cause is a routing step with zero hours and zero setup, and the fix is quick.
A Job Shows Fewer Hours Than Its Routing Requires
When a job's scheduled hours fall short of its routing math, the cause is usually partial-completion accounting or an alternate work center with a speed factor. How to read it.
A Job Was Booked During a Machine Downtime Window
When a job schedules inside a maintenance window, the closure was almost always entered after the last run. How to model machine downtime today, and how to clear the booking.
A Job's Schedule Bar Is Wider Than Its Hours Suggest
When a Gantt bar spans far more calendar time than the work hours, the cause is a low utilization cap on the order, high queue time, a large setup charge, or shifts spread thin.
A Schedule Points to a Deleted Work Center
When a schedule references a work center that was deleted, reports cannot resolve it. Restore the machine or reassign the routing step, then re-run scheduling.
A Work Center Shows More Hours Than It Has: The Causes
When a work center's daily booking exceeds its physical hours, it is one of three causes: synchronized machines, stale reschedule rows, or an understated instance count.
An Anchored Job Did Not Hit Its Target Date
When a bottleneck-anchored job fails to schedule to its target, the cause is bottleneck capacity, a past target date, or feeder steps that cannot finish in time.
Capacity vs Throughput in Manufacturing Scheduling
Capacity is the hours a shop could run; throughput is the good output it actually ships. Here is why the two diverge and why adding capacity off the bottleneck adds nothing.
Choosing a Planning Bucket: Day, Week, or Period in EDGEBIC
EDGEBIC plans demand and supply in buckets of a day, a week, or a 28-day period. Here is how each granularity behaves and how to pick the right one for a product.
Demand Fence vs Planning Fence in EDGEBIC
The two time fences in EDGEBIC's MPS suppress different things: the demand fence hides stale forecast, the planning fence protects committed builds. Here is how each works.