Quoting Against Real Capacity: The EDGEBIC Quoting Guide

Quoting software for manufacturers has one job that spreadsheets cannot do: promise a date the shop can actually keep. EDGEBIC by User Solutions quotes by simulation: it runs the quoted job through the same finite capacity scheduling engine that plans your real production, against your current live load, and reads off the start date, end date, work hours, cost, and margin. Nothing touches the production schedule, and the promise you send the customer already accounts for every job ahead of it in the queue.

This pillar covers the full quoting workflow: creating a quote, running the simulation, reading costs and margins, testing what-if promise dates with backward scheduling and scenarios, and converting the accepted quote into a manufacturing order. Everything here is documented behavior of EDGEBIC, the current-generation scheduling platform from User Solutions, building on 35+ years of finite capacity scheduling for manufacturers including GE, Cummins, BAE Systems, and the US Navy.

One vocabulary note up front, because honesty matters more in quoting than anywhere else: EDGEBIC provides quote simulation and what-if promise dates. It does not hold or reserve capacity against a quote; a simulation is discarded after its numbers are read, and real capacity is committed only when a real order is scheduled.

Why Quotes Fail: The Load You Cannot See

Most manufacturers price quotes from a routing: hours times rates plus material. That math is necessary but not sufficient, because it answers "what does this cost?" while the customer is asking "when will I get it?" The answer to the second question depends on something no spreadsheet contains: what your shop is already committed to.

Consider a mill with 320 hours of existing work booked in the week you would like to start. A routing-only estimate says your new job's 101 mill hours start Monday. Reality says they queue. The gap between those two answers is late deliveries, expedite fees, and the slow erosion of customer trust: the exact failure mode finite capacity scheduling exists to prevent.

EDGEBIC closes the gap by making the quote a scheduling problem. When you click Simulate, the system creates a temporary, invisible job for the quoted product and quantity, schedules it with the live engine (the same shifts, holidays, work-center capacity, setup times, and existing job load a real run sees), reads the resulting dates and allocated hours, prices them, and deletes the temporary job. Nothing is written to the production schedule. Your Gantt and every existing job are untouched, and the temporary job is deleted even if the simulation fails.

Creating a Quote

A quote captures a customer enquiry before anything is committed: which product, how many, when, at what price. The essentials on the quote dialog:

Three prerequisites decide quote quality before you ever simulate. The product needs a routing. Work centers need hourly rates, because a rate of zero silently prices that step at $0.00 (the most common cause of too-good-to-be-true margins). And shifts and calendars need to reflect reality, because the simulation respects them exactly: garbage calendars produce garbage promise dates.

Even before simulating, the dialog's cost panel fills with a routing-based estimate, including sub-assembly work rolled in recursively. It is a sanity check; the simulation replaces it with capacity-aware numbers.

The Simulation: One Worked Quote

The documented example runs an enquiry from a customer wanting 200 units of Widget-A, delivery by September 1, quoted on July 16.

Widget-A's routing: a saw at 0.5 hours setup plus 0.10 hours per unit, a mill at 1.0 hour setup plus 0.50 hours per unit, and assembly at 0.15 hours per unit. Rates: $40, $60, and $35 per hour. Unit material cost $6.50.

Simulate, and the engine allocates:

Estimated hours: 151.5. Estimated cost: $9,230. And the part no spreadsheet produces: scheduled around the existing load on the day shift, the window comes back July 20 through August 14, a 25-day lead time that already includes queuing behind other work.

At the quoted $85 per unit, total price is $17,000, profit is $7,770, and margin is 45.7%, painted green in the grid (green above 20%, amber above 10%, red when negative). Had you left the unit price at zero, the 25% default markup would have proposed $9,230 × 1.25 ÷ 200 = $57.69 per unit. Once you type your own price, EDGEBIC never overwrites it on later simulations; re-derive deliberately with Apply Markup when costs change.

Two reading rules keep the numbers honest:

Hours are work hours, not calendar hours. A job spanning Friday afternoon to Monday morning covers about 66 clock hours but may contain 6 hours of actual work. Cost is always computed from allocated work hours; costing from the date span would overstate labor several-fold.

Costs are a snapshot. If work-center rates or capacity change after simulation, the quote view shows a warning banner telling you to refresh and re-simulate before sending. A 90-day-old simulation is fiction; the default 30-day expiry exists for a reason.

For the full allocation detail, the row's details window shows exactly which work center got which hours on which days, plus a summary of dates, lead time, cost, price, profit, and margin.

What-If Promise Dates: Forward, Backward, and the Direct Answer

The scheduling direction changes what your target date means, and it turns the quote into a direct answer machine:

To answer "can you deliver by September 1?" directly, set the direction to Backward with September 1 as the target. If the simulated end comes back on or before the target, the answer is yes, and the simulation shows the latest safe start. If the end comes back after the target, the backward plan did not fit and the engine fell back to a forward run: that is your "no, and here is when it would land" in one step. The direction rules mirror production scheduling exactly; see forward vs backward scheduling for the underlying concept.

The direction is remembered on the quote and carries onto the manufacturing order at conversion, so a backward quote becomes a backward order and the real schedule reproduces the plan you sold.

Scenarios: Named Alternatives, Compared With Numbers

One simulation answers one question. Real negotiations ask several: what if we added a second shift? What if we ran the weekend? What if we outsourced the milling? EDGEBIC's scenario view answers them side by side without cloning quotes.

A scenario is a named variant of the quote's simulation with deliberately altered conditions. Each stores its own simulated dates, hours, and costs. The levers:

• Production settings: allow weekend production, raise the simulated job's priority, allow parallel routing paths, or set a custom start date (for example, after raw material arrives).
• Work center capacity overrides: a percentage slider per machine, inside this scenario only. 150% simulates a second-shift equivalent or overtime; 50% simulates a machine at half strength.
• Step overrides: skip a routing step, replace its machine, modify its setup or process time, or resequence it.

Scenarios respect your real capacity data, including per-day and monthly capacity overrides already configured, so each one is "today's real shop, plus my one experiment," not a fantasy calendar. Two honest limits, stated plainly: scenario simulations always run forward (a backward quote's finish-by framing does not carry in, so compare scenario end dates against the customer date yourself), and no scenario ever consumes or reserves real capacity; there is no capacity-hold mechanism behind a quote.

The documented negotiation

The customer calls back on the 200-unit quote: "We need them by August 8." The base simulation ends August 14, six days late. Three scenarios later:

The comparison tab charts lead time (25, 16, and 19 days), cost, and utilization per scenario. The second shift costs $240 more than the weekend push and buys three days of safety margin; the weekend option hits the date exactly with zero slack. You select the winner and apply it to the quote: its dates and $9,830 cost stamp onto the quote, and margin at the agreed $85 per unit recalculates to 42.2%, still comfortably green.

One discipline note the product documentation is emphatic about: applying a scenario updates the quote's numbers only. It does not add the second shift, change the routing, or alter any work center. Before converting, make the real change (the actual shift, the real capacity override, the routing edit) so a production run can reproduce the promise. Scenario promises need real-world follow-through.

Good scenario hygiene is classic what-if discipline: keep a no-override Standard baseline, name scenarios after the lever (not "Scenario 2"), change one lever per scenario so you know what bought the improvement, and check the utilization chart, because a plan that wins by running a machine at full capacity for three weeks has zero absorption for breakdowns.

Reading the Results Like a Pro

Once simulations are running routinely, the quote grid becomes a pipeline dashboard, and a few columns deserve deliberate reading habits:

Start and end dates are the simulated production window against real current capacity, not routing arithmetic. If they look too far out, the shop really is that full: check the work-center utilization report before assuming an error, or reach for a scenario.

Estimated hours include every routing step and, recursively, every sub-assembly's own routing hours with its quantity multiplier. A product whose work lives mostly in sub-assemblies prices correctly instead of reading as nearly zero hours.

Estimated cost splits into labor (each work center's hours times its rate, with a per-step labor rate on the routing winning over the work-center rate) and material (material-type routing steps, or the product's unit cost times quantity as the fallback).

Margin color is a discipline tool: green above 20%, amber above 10%, red when negative. Treat amber as "get approval" and red as "do not send," and the thresholds become a pricing policy everyone can see.

Quoted versus actual hours fills in after conversion as real production hours accumulate against the linked order. This is the column that turns quoting into a learning system: a product that consistently burns 15% more hours than quoted is telling you to fix the routing, the rate, or the price. Because the manual cost override preserves the calculated labor and material split, the variance report can still separate "we underestimated the work" from "we deliberately priced around a known extra," which is exactly the distinction the next quote needs.

From Quote to Order: One Click, One Direction

Quotes move through a lifecycle (Draft, Submitted, Under Review, Approved, Rejected, Expired) that you manage freely, with one exception: Converted is set by the system and is final.

Conversion is one click, and it carries everything that matters:

The new order is created, not yet scheduled; it lands on the calendar at the next scheduling run, planned around everything already committed. Conversion is one-way and guarded: a converted quote can never produce a second order, so repeat business gets a new quote or a new order.

The loop closes after production: the quote grid's quoted-versus-actual hours column starts filling as shop floor actuals come in against the linked order, so every quote becomes a data point that sharpens the next one. Consistent margin discipline up front (treat amber as "get approval," red as "do not send") is what makes that variance report meaningful.

Practices That Separate Good Quoting Shops

Simulate before you send, every time. The routing-only estimate ignores current shop load; the simulation is the only number that includes it.

Use backward for date promises. Right-align against the customer date and read the answer; do not guess a start date and eyeball the gap.

Put rates on every production work center, and model material as material. A missing rate prices a step at zero; for multi-component products, material-type routing steps beat the unit-cost fallback, which prices only the end product's own cost.

Use the manual cost override, not a fudged price, for known extras. The override keeps the calculated labor/material split intact for variance reporting; a hand-bumped price hides the reason forever.

Keep expiry dates honest. Capacity moves daily. Re-simulate anything older than its expiry before reviving it.

Two to four scenarios, not twelve. The baseline plus one per realistic lever. Enumerate only alternatives you would actually execute.

This quoting discipline pairs naturally with the rest of the platform: the scheduling engine that makes the simulation trustworthy, the worked examples that include a complete quote-to-ship walkthrough, and the sales-order and demand side covered in the inventory and planning guide. If your quote data starts life in an ERP, the import masks bring products, routings, and orders across; see the ERP integration approach.

User Solutions has watched quoting-by-guesswork sink delivery performance since 1991, and quoting-by-capacity fix it. If your win rate is fine but your kept-promise rate is not, the problem is rarely sales; it is that nobody could see the mill's next three weeks at quote time. Contact US for a demo with one real routing and one real enquiry, and price it against your live load before the meeting ends.