What Is a Quote Simulation in Production Scheduling?
User Solutions TeamA quote simulation runs the real finite-capacity scheduling engine against your current live plan to determine when a prospective job would actually start and finish and what it would cost, and then discards the result. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions the mechanism is deliberately literal: a temporary invisible job is created, scheduled against your real capacity where every existing job keeps its reserved hours, read for dates, hours and costs, and then deleted, so nothing is ever written to the production schedule.
This entry is part of the EDGEBIC glossary series; for the broader vocabulary of production planning, see the manufacturing glossary.
How a Quote Simulation Works
The word simulation can suggest an approximation, and that is the opposite of what happens here. The engine doing the work is the same engine that produces your committed schedule, running against the same data: the same shifts, the same holidays, the same work-center capacity, the same setup times, and crucially the same existing job load.
The sequence is:
- A temporary job is created for the quoted product and quantity.
- It is scheduled with the live engine against current real capacity. Every existing job keeps its reserved hours; every holiday and shift boundary applies.
- The resulting dates are read off, the allocated work hours are summed, and those hours are priced.
- The temporary job is deleted.
The prerequisites are the ones the engine always needs. The product must have a routing, because there is nothing to schedule without one. Work centers need hourly rates, because labor cost is hours times rate and a rate of zero silently prices that step at nothing. Shifts and calendars must be current, because garbage calendars produce garbage promise dates just as reliably in a simulation as in a real run.
Direction changes the question being asked. A forward simulation starts on the target date and reports when the job would finish. A backward simulation finishes by that date, starting as late as possible with today as the earliest-start floor, which is the just-in-time answer to whether delivery by a given date is possible. The direction is remembered on the quote and carries onto the manufacturing order at conversion.
A Worked Example
From the documentation's sample quote, QUO-2026-011 for 200 of Widget-A.
Before simulation, the row shows only a routing-based estimate: hours and cost from the arithmetic of the routing, including sub-assemblies, which is a useful sanity check and nothing more. It knows how long the work takes and nothing at all about whether the plant is free.
The planner ticks the quote and presses Simulate. When the run finishes the row fills in: start July 20, end August 14, estimated hours 151.50, estimated cost $9,230.00, profit $7,770.00, margin 45.7 percent. The detail window shows a lead time of 25 days.
The load-bearing sentence in the documentation is what those dates already contain: they account for the 320 hours of other work for the same customer sitting on CNC-Mill-1 that week. Nothing in the routing estimate could have produced that August date. It came from the simulation walking real capacity that other jobs had already claimed.
The plant's Gantt looks identical throughout. Nothing was booked, nothing moved, and the temporary job no longer exists.
How EDGEBIC Uses Quote Simulations
Some specifics that matter in daily use:
- You can simulate a batch. Ticking several quotes simulates all of them; ticking nothing simulates every not-yet-simulated quote in the current filter.
- Sub-assemblies are rolled in recursively. A product whose work lives mostly in sub-assemblies no longer reads as zero hours, because each sub-assembly's own routing hours and labor cost are included through any depth, respecting the per-step quantity multiplier.
- The results are a point-in-time snapshot. If work-center rates or capacity change afterward, the quote view shows a banner asking you to refresh and re-simulate before sending. Take it seriously; the alternative is quoting on a rate that no longer exists.
- A typed unit price is protected. If the price was zero at simulation time it is auto-filled from cost and markup; once you type your own, later simulations never overwrite it.
- Scenarios build on the same mechanism. A quote can hold several what-if variants, standard against expedited against outside-vendor routing, each simulated the same way. See a quote scenario.
- Conversion carries the numbers forward. The simulated dates become the order's target start and planned window, and the estimated cost, split and hours become estimate fields that later feed quote-versus-actual variance.
The habit worth forming is to simulate before promising, every time, including on jobs that feel routine. Simulation costs nothing and changes nothing, and the quote it protects you on is rarely the one you expected. The quote simulation explainer covers the screens, how a quote simulation produces a realistic date covers the reasoning, and estimated lead time on a quote covers the figure that comes back.
A quote simulation runs the real finite-capacity scheduling engine against your current live plan to work out when a prospective job would actually start and finish, and what it would cost. It creates a temporary invisible job, schedules it against real capacity where every existing job keeps its reserved hours, reads off the dates, hours and costs, and then deletes the temporary job. Nothing is written to the production schedule.
No. The simulated schedule exists only long enough to read the numbers off it, then it is discarded. Your Gantt, your work-center load, and every existing job are untouched, which is why you can simulate the same quote twenty times in a day without moving anything. The only things that change are the quote's own estimated dates, hours and cost fields.
Because it accounts for the work you have already promised. A lead-time rule of thumb assumes the plant is empty; a simulation subtracts every hour already claimed by existing jobs before offering the prospective job a slot. If a customer's key machine is booked solid for three weeks, a rule of thumb hides that and a simulation shows it as a later date on the quote, while you can still do something about it.
It adds the part experience cannot see, which is the current book. Your instinct encodes how long the work takes; what it cannot encode is how many hours a particular work center has already sold to other customers this month, because that number changes daily and nobody carries it in their head. The documentation's own example makes the point: a quote's simulated dates already account for hundreds of hours of other work sitting on the mill that week, and no amount of routing experience would have surfaced that. The practical difference shows up in your worst quotes rather than your average ones. Typical jobs in a typical week are exactly where experience is reliable, and the simulation agrees with you. It earns its keep on the rush order in a loaded month, which is also the quote most likely to hurt if you get it wrong.
It is an answer, and a useful one. On a backward quote you set the target as a finish-by date and the engine schedules as late as possible while still landing on or before it, with today as the earliest-start floor. When the work genuinely does not fit between now and that date, the backward pass cannot succeed and the engine falls back to a forward run from the earliest legal start. The end date you are looking at is therefore where the job would really land. Read it as a one-step reply to can you deliver by then: no, and here is when it would arrive instead. That is a far more useful thing to take to a customer than a refusal, because it converts a dead conversation into a negotiation about a real date.
Expert Q&A: Deep Dive
Q: We already estimate lead time from experience and it is usually close enough. What does a simulation add?
A: It adds the part experience cannot see, which is the current book. Your instinct encodes how long the work takes; what it cannot encode is how many hours a particular work center has already sold to other customers this month, because that number changes daily and nobody carries it in their head. The documentation's own example makes the point: a quote's simulated dates already account for hundreds of hours of other work sitting on the mill that week, and no amount of routing experience would have surfaced that. The practical difference shows up in your worst quotes rather than your average ones. Typical jobs in a typical week are exactly where experience is reliable, and the simulation agrees with you. It earns its keep on the rush order in a loaded month, which is also the quote most likely to hurt if you get it wrong.
Q: A backward quote came back with an end date after the date we asked for. Is that a failure?
A: It is an answer, and a useful one. On a backward quote you set the target as a finish-by date and the engine schedules as late as possible while still landing on or before it, with today as the earliest-start floor. When the work genuinely does not fit between now and that date, the backward pass cannot succeed and the engine falls back to a forward run from the earliest legal start. The end date you are looking at is therefore where the job would really land. Read it as a one-step reply to can you deliver by then: no, and here is when it would arrive instead. That is a far more useful thing to take to a customer than a refusal, because it converts a dead conversation into a negotiation about a real date.
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