Production ETA
The ETA card appears on the job detail page and answers one question: when will this job actually ship? It gives you three dates and tells you whether you are on track to hit the one you promised.
The Three Dates
Promised is the delivery date you committed to when the job was created. It comes directly from the job record and never changes unless you update it manually. This is the target everything else is measured against.
Trajectory is the honest projection. It accounts for everything happening on your shop floor right now: supplier lead times for materials still on order, work orders waiting on dependencies, equipment already booked on other jobs, and outside operations sent to subcontractors. If another job is using the same CNC for the next four days, Trajectory knows that and pushes your date out accordingly.
Floor is the best-case date. It shows how fast this job could ship if it had the shop to itself, no competing work, and suppliers delivered exactly on their lead time estimates. Floor is useful as a sanity check, not as a promise. If Floor is already past your Promised date, you have a real problem that no amount of prioritization will fix.
When Trajectory and Floor are the same day, the job has no resource conflicts. When they diverge, the gap tells you how much schedule pressure you are absorbing from other active jobs.
Status Messages
"Computing first ETA..." means the engine has not finished its first calculation yet. This typically takes less than a minute after a job is created. Refresh the page if it persists longer than a couple of minutes.
"Last computed N hours ago" means the displayed dates are stale. The engine recalculates on a schedule, but if something significant just changed, click Refresh to trigger a new calculation immediately.
Refreshing the ETA
The Refresh button triggers a new calculation on demand. It is rate-limited to once every 30 seconds per job to avoid overloading the scheduling engine. If the button is greyed out briefly after you click it, wait a moment and try again.
You do not need to refresh manually after every change. Forge recalculates the ETA automatically when you:
- Receive a purchase order (materials available date changes)
- Send or receive an outside operation (subcontractor lead time updated)
- Update a supplier lead time on a pending PO or RFQ
For other changes, such as adding a work order or adjusting quantities, use the Refresh button after saving.
Related Articles
- Critical Path Action — the single most important thing to do right now to protect your ship date
- Work Orders — how work orders and their dependencies affect the schedule
- Receiving Against a PO — how receiving materials updates the ETA automatically