A cost rollup adds up a job's cost from its scheduled routing, labor as each step's work-center hours times that work center's rate, plus material from the routing or the product's unit cost, to give a total the quote can be priced from. It turns a plan into a number you can quote, cost, and compare.
This entry defines the cost rollup and shows how it reads inside EDGEBIC by User Solutions. For the wider index of terms, see the manufacturing glossary; for the priced what-if it supports, see what is a step override in quote scenarios; and for the simulation that produces the hours, see EDGEBIC quote simulation explained.
How it works
A cost rollup builds a job's total cost from the bottom up, one routing step at a time. For labor, each scheduled step has planned hours on a work center, and every work center carries a canonical hourly rate. Multiplying hours by rate gives the step's labor cost, and summing across every step gives the job's labor total.
Material is the other half. It comes from the routing's material rows where they exist, or from the product's unit cost as a fallback. Added to labor, it completes the cost of making the job.
The hours that drive labor are not a flat estimate; they come from the finite-capacity simulation, so they include setup and run time as the plan would actually run them. That grounding is what separates a rollup from a back-of-envelope guess. Once the cost is rolled up, a markup is applied on top to derive the quoted price, keeping cost and price as separate, deliberate numbers.
A concrete example
Think of building a price for a catered dinner. You total the cooks' hours at their hourly rate (labor), add the groceries (material), and that sum is your cost. Then you add a markup to reach the menu price. A cost rollup is the same arithmetic for a manufacturing job, with each routing step standing in for a cook and each work center rate standing in for a wage.
Take a job whose scheduled routing has three work-center steps: 4 hours at $120, 2 hours at $90, and 1 hour at $150, plus $400 of material. Labor is 480 plus 180 plus 150, or $810. Add the $400 of material and the rolled-up cost is $1,210. Apply a markup and you have the quoted price, with the difference being your margin. Change the plan, say a step runs longer, and the rollup moves with it because it reads the real hours.
How EDGEBIC uses it
In EDGEBIC, the cost rollup is computed from the simulated schedule inside quoting. Labor rolls up from work-center hours at each work center's rate, material rolls up from material rows or the product unit cost, and a configurable markup turns cost into price. Because every quote and every scenario prices through the same engine, their rolled-up costs are directly comparable.
That comparability is the practical payoff. When a scenario swaps a work center or retimes a step, the rollup reflects the new plan, so you can see whether an option actually saves money or merely relocates cost. And because the hours are the plan's real hours, the cost is defensible rather than a guess, which matters when a customer questions a quote.
When a quote is approved and converts to an order, the cost basis carries forward, so the number you quoted and the number you plan against agree. To see how a single-step change alters the rollup, read what is a step override in quote scenarios; to see the full quote-to-order flow, read EDGEBIC quote simulation explained.
Expert Q&A: Deep Dive
Q: Two quote options came back with almost the same cost even though one uses an outside vendor. Why?
A: Because the cost rollup sums labor and material from each option's scheduled routing, and if the outside-vendor option removed some in-house labor while adding its own charge, the totals can land close together. The rollup is telling you the truth: the vendor swap traded one cost for another rather than saving money. Read the rollup by step to see where the difference actually is. If the goal was a cheaper job, target a change that removes cost rather than relocating it, and re-simulate to see the new total.
Q: My rolled-up cost looks too low. Where should I check first?
A: Start with the work-center rates and the material inputs, because the rollup is only as accurate as those. If a work center's hourly rate is unset or too low, its steps contribute too little labor and the total looks light. If material rows are missing and the product unit cost is zero, material drops out entirely. The scheduled hours themselves come from the simulation and are usually sound, so a suspiciously low rollup almost always traces to a missing rate or a missing material figure rather than to the hours.
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