How a Scenario's Priority Level Changes the Quoted Date in EDGEBIC

A quote scenario in EDGEBIC carries a priority level from 1 to 10, and raising it lets the simulated job claim contested capacity sooner, which can pull the quoted finish date earlier. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions, a scenario is a named what-if variant of a quote's simulation, and priority level is one of the knobs it exposes. The default is 5. The number governs how the quoted job competes against work already booked on the same machines during the same days. When capacity is contested, a higher priority buys an earlier slot. When it is not, the number does nothing, and that is worth knowing too.

What priority level actually controls

Every quote simulation runs the real finite capacity engine against your current shop. That means the simulation sees the capacity that existing scheduled jobs have already consumed. Your quoted job is not scheduled into an empty calendar; it competes for whatever time is left, exactly as it would on the floor.

Priority level is how a scenario tells the engine how hard the quoted job should compete. At the default 5, it takes its turn among the other work. Raise it toward 10 and it gets more standing, so when two jobs both want the mill on Tuesday morning, the higher-priority job claims the slot and the other one waits. Lower it toward 1 and the quoted job yields to almost everything else.

This is a simulation setting, not a live change. Nothing you do to a scenario moves a real job. For the full boundary of what a scenario can and cannot touch, see what a scenario can and cannot change in EDGEBIC.

When the number moves the date, and when it does not

Priority only matters under contention. Picture the difference:

The practical takeaway: raising priority is a diagnostic as much as a lever. Run the base scenario, note the estimated end date, then run a copy at priority 9 and compare. If the date closes, queue position was your constraint. If it barely moves, the constraint is total work and the calendar, and no amount of standing will help. That points you at real capacity instead, the subject of boosting a work center's capacity in a quote scenario.

A worked comparison

A customer wants 300 brackets and the standard routing runs Cutting, then Drilling, then Deburring. Your base simulation finishes on the 18th, two days past the customer's requested 16th. That week the mill is heavily booked with three other jobs.

You build a scenario, leave the routing untouched, and set the priority level to 9. On the re-run, the quoted job now outranks two of the three jobs already competing for the mill, so it claims the Tuesday and Wednesday morning slots those jobs would have held. The Drilling and Deburring steps shift earlier in turn. The scenario finishes on the 15th, inside the customer date.

Now you know the date is reachable, but you also know the cost: two other jobs slid later to make room. That is a real trade, and it is a decision for a planner, not a default. You either commit the 15th and accept the knock-on, or you go back with the honest 18th. Either way you chose with numbers, not a guess.

Compare that to a shop where the mill has open time all week. There, the same priority-9 scenario finishes on exactly the same day as the base run, because there was no contested slot to win. The lesson is identical each time: priority changes the date only when something was in the way.

Priority is not the whole promise

A scenario's priority level rides alongside its other settings: a capacity override, weekend production, parallel processing, a custom start date, and per-step overrides. Priority answers one narrow question, which is where the job sits in line. It does not add hours to a machine or open a weekend. If contention is not your problem, reach for the knob that is.

Remember too that scenario simulations always run forward. They start at the scenario's start date and report when the work finishes. A backward, finish-by promise does not carry into a scenario, so for a finish-by date you compare each scenario's estimated end against the customer date yourself. This forward-only rule is the same reason the quote simulation reports an end date you read rather than a date it right-aligns to.

The takeaway

Priority level is the scenario's queue-position lever, a 1 to 10 setting that decides how hard the quoted job competes for capacity other jobs also want. Default it at 5, raise it to test a rush, and read the estimated end date to learn whether queue position was ever your constraint. When it moves the date, you see exactly what a rush costs the jobs you bumped. When it does not, you have learned the real limit is capacity or the calendar, and you can stop looking for a shortcut that was never there. See the full flow in the EDGEBIC quoting guide, read how contention shapes any plan in production bottleneck identification, and see the platform in full on the EDGEBIC overview.