Quoting Against a Date That Has Already Passed in EDGEBIC

A finish-by date that has already passed cannot be planned into, because the earliest start a quote simulation will consider is today. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions, a backward quote right-aligns the work against your target date and works back, but never earlier than today. When there is no room left between that floor and the date, the plan does not fit, the run falls back to forward, and the end date comes back later than the target. That result is the answer, not a fault.

The floor exists so the date stays usable

A backward quote answers a customer question directly: can you deliver by this date, and how late can we afford to start? To answer it, the simulation places the work as late as possible while still ending on or before the target date.

Working backward could in principle run off the end of the calendar into last week. It does not, because the earliest start it will use is today. Everything the simulation returns is therefore achievable from the moment you read it, which is the only kind of date worth quoting.

That single rule produces all the behavior in this post. If the total work will not fit between today and the target date, there is nowhere legal to put it.

What you see when it does not fit

The comparison to make is simple, and it is the reason to set the direction before you simulate rather than after.

On a backward quote, an end date later than the target is the refusal. The backward plan did not fit, so the engine fell back to a forward run and told you where the work would genuinely land. You get the no and the alternative in one step, which is exactly what you need on a phone call. The direction rules themselves are covered in what makes a promise date credible.

Three flavors of a past date, and what each one means

A finish-by date behind today. The clearest case. An enquiry that sat in an inbox for a month can easily arrive at your desk asking for a date that has already gone. There is no fit to find. Simulate anyway, because the forward fallback tells you the earliest real date, and that is what you take back to the customer.

A finish-by date technically ahead but too near. Less obvious and more common. The date is next week, the work is a hundred hours through a machine that is already committed, and the floor is today. The arithmetic fails for the same reason: not enough room between the floor and the target. Same reading, same answer.

A forward target start date behind today. On a forward quote the target start date is your assumption about when work begins. An assumption in the past is not a plan, it is a leftover from an older version of the enquiry, and any date built on it should be treated as suspect. Set it to a date you can actually start, which for most quotes means today or the day material lands. Working from a genuine start date is covered in quoting from a realistic start date.

There is a fourth case worth naming because it is easy to miss: a what-if scenario whose custom start date sits in the past will produce results that look better than they should, because the scenario appears to have had time nobody has. If one scenario suddenly beats the baseline by a suspicious margin, check its start date first.

Read the refusal as a position, not an error

The instinct when a quote comes back later than the customer's date is to adjust something until the number looks acceptable. Resist it for one round, because the honest result is information you can trade with.

You now know three things you did not know before: that the date cannot be met against current load, roughly how far out the work genuinely lands, and therefore how much time you would need to buy. From there the options are concrete rather than hopeful:

• Negotiate to the honest date. Often the customer's date was aspirational and the real one is fine.
• Test a lever before promising. A what-if scenario can try more capacity on the constraining machine, or weekend hours, and report a real date with a real cost. See comparing routing options for a quote.
• Decline cleanly. A specific no delivered early costs far less than a yes that ships late.

What none of those options is: quietly moving the target date until the software stops objecting. The date was never the constraint. The load was.

A worked example

An enquiry arrives asking for 200 units with delivery wanted by a date that, by the time it reaches the estimator, is eleven days away. The estimator creates the quote, sets the direction to backward, puts the customer's date in as the finish-by target, and simulates.

The result comes back with an end date about three weeks past the target. Read correctly, that is the refusal: the backward plan could not fit between today and the customer's date, so the run went forward and reported where the work actually lands. The milling step queues behind committed work, and no amount of right-aligning invents hours that are already sold.

The estimator now has a real conversation to have. The honest date is three weeks past what was asked. A scenario with extra capacity on the mill shortens that materially but adds cost, which becomes an option with a price rather than a favor. Either the customer takes the honest date, or they pay for the compression, or they go elsewhere with three weeks' notice instead of a late delivery.

The one thing the estimator does not do is nudge the target date forward until the grid looks calm. That produces a promise nobody in the shop agreed to. Why a full shop returns a far date, and how to prove it, is in quoting when the shop is already full.

The takeaway

A quote simulation will not plan into the past, because the earliest start it considers is today, which is what keeps every date it returns achievable. So a finish-by date already behind you, or too near to fit, produces an end date later than the target: the backward plan did not fit and the forward fallback showed you where the work really lands. Treat that as your negotiating position rather than an error, check that forward quotes and scenario start dates are not built on stale assumptions, and take the honest date or the priced alternative to the customer. Walk the whole workflow in the EDGEBIC quoting guide, see why a promise ages in quote expiry dates, see the platform on the EDGEBIC overview, and if you are coming from Resource Manager DB, start with the RMDB to EDGEBIC path.