Quoting a Rush Order in EDGEBIC: Confirm the Date, Price the Premium

Quoting a rush order in EDGEBIC is two jobs: confirm a date the shop can actually hit, then price the premium honestly. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions, backward scheduling gives a direct yes or no on a tight finish-by date, a scenario finds the capacity to hit it when the standard routing misses, and a higher markup plus a manual cost override price the expedite without hiding anything. Done this way, a rush quote is deliverable and defensible, instead of a flat surcharge bolted onto a date you are hoping to keep.

Two problems, not one

A rush order asks two separate questions, and the mistake is treating them as one. The first is "can you hit this date?" The second is "what does the rush cost?" A flat surcharge answers neither. It does not check whether the tight date is feasible against your real backlog, and it does not tie the premium to any real extra cost.

EDGEBIC keeps the two apart. The date is a scheduling question, answered by simulating against real capacity. The price is a costing question, answered by markup and an override. Solve each on its own terms and the rush quote holds together.

Confirming the date with backward scheduling

The direct way to answer a rush date is to set the quote's scheduling direction to Backward and the target to the customer's finish-by date. The engine then schedules the job as late as it safely can while still ending on or before that date, with today as the earliest-start floor.

The answer is one step. If the simulated end comes back on or before the target, the answer is yes, and you also see the latest date you can safely start. If it comes back after the target, the backward plan did not fit and the engine fell back to a forward run, which is your honest no along with the date the job would actually land. That fallback is what turns a flat refusal into a real alternative you can take back to the customer. The direction rules are the same as production; see forward versus backward scheduling and what makes a promise date credible.

Finding capacity when the standard routing misses

If backward scheduling says the standard routing cannot hit the date, that is where scenarios come in. A scenario tests one lever against the same real capacity and stores its own date and cost.

For a rush, the useful levers are the ones that add throughput at the bottleneck:

• A second shift on the constraint. Raise the bottleneck work center's capacity, for the scenario only, to simulate a second-shift equivalent, and re-run.
• An outside vendor for a slow step. Replace one step's work center with a vendor's via a step override, keeping the rest in-house.
• Weekend production. Allow weekend shift hours to buy calendar days.

Build one scenario per lever, compare the dates and costs side by side, and pick the one that hits the date at a price the margin can carry. The mechanics are in comparing routing options for a quote. One discipline note: applying a scenario updates the quote's numbers, not the real shop, so before converting a rush sold on a second shift or a vendor step, make that change real so production can reproduce the promise.

Pricing the rush honestly

Once the date is confirmed, price the premium. Two tools do this cleanly, and they cover different things.

A higher markup covers the general premium of expediting: the disruption, the priority, the value of speed to the customer. Where a standard job might carry the default 25 percent markup, a rush might carry 30 percent or more.

A manual cost override covers concrete extra costs the schedule cannot see: tooling wear on a hard alloy, an expected scrap allowance, freight on an oversized part. Simulate first so EDGEBIC rolls up the honest labor and material, then set the override to your all-in cost basis. Profit and margin compute from the override, while the calculated split stays stored for the later variance report.

Keeping these separate matters. The markup prices the value of speed; the override prices real dollars of extra cost. Fudging a single unit price would blur both and hide the reasoning; see setting markup and unit price.

A worked rush quote

A customer needs 50 precision castings faster than the standard routing delivers, and there is real extra cost. The base simulation rolls up:

The planner knows tooling wear and scrap add about $2,000, so sets a manual override of $19,400 and applies a 30 percent rush markup:

unit price = 19,400 x 1.30 / 50 = $504.40
total price = 504.40 x 50        = $25,220
profit      = 25,220 - 19,400    = $5,820
margin      = 5,820 / 25,220     = 23.1%

At 23.1 percent the margin still reads green, so the rush is priced to make money. The $14,400 labor and $3,000 material split stays on the record, so if the job later runs hotter than quoted, the variance report can show whether the gap was the work or the expedite. The date, meanwhile, was confirmed against real capacity, not assumed.

The takeaway

Quoting a rush order well means solving two problems separately. Confirm the date with a backward simulation, and use scenarios to find the capacity when the standard routing falls short, so the tight promise is real against your backlog. Then price the premium with a higher markup for the value of speed and a manual override for concrete extra costs, keeping the calculated split for later variance. A 50-piece rush casting priced this way lands at $504.40 a unit and a 23.1 percent margin, deliverable and defensible. A flat surcharge does neither job; this does both. Walk the full workflow in the EDGEBIC quoting guide, see the full-shop version in quoting when the shop is already full, and see the platform in full on the EDGEBIC overview.