Why Quote Against Real Capacity in EDGEBIC (Not a Lead-Time Rule of Thumb)

Quoting against real capacity means the promise date is computed by scheduling the quoted job through your actual current shop load, not by adding a fixed number of days to today. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions, the quote simulation borrows the live finite capacity scheduling engine and runs it against the same shifts, holidays, setup times, and existing job reservations that a real scheduling run sees. The result is a date the shop can actually hit, because it already accounts for everything sitting on the floor right now. A lead-time rule of thumb cannot do this, and the gap between the two is where late shipments and lost customers come from.

The rule-of-thumb trap

Most shops start with a lead-time rule: add four weeks, add six weeks, add a month for anything with a machined part. The rule is simple, fast, and wrong most of the time, because it assumes one thing that is never true: that your shop load is constant.

A flat lead time is calibrated to a single moment. If it was set when the shop was half empty, it over-promises against a full backlog and the job ships late. If it was set when the shop was slammed, it under-promises against a quiet week and you hand the customer a slower date than you could actually deliver. Either way the rule is guessing, and the customer is the one who finds out.

The trap gets worse at the bottleneck. Every shop has at least one constraint resource that sets the pace, and that resource is exactly where the rule of thumb breaks first. A machine that is 40% loaded and a machine that is 110% loaded look identical to a fixed lead time. They look completely different to a scheduling engine.

What "real capacity" actually includes

When EDGEBIC simulates a quote, it does not schedule against an empty calendar. It schedules against the plant as it stands:

• Existing job reservations. Every committed order keeps its reserved hours. The quoted job competes for whatever capacity is left.
• Shift calendars and holidays. The simulation respects real working hours, weekend rules, and plant shutdowns. A job cannot be promised time that does not exist.
• Finite work-center capacity. A machine runs one job at a time. This is the difference between finite and infinite capacity scheduling, and it is the whole point: an infinite-capacity view stacks work and lies about the date, while a finite view queues it and tells the truth.
• Setup times and routing sequence. Changeovers and step dependencies extend the window the same way they will in production.

The mechanism matters. The simulation creates a temporary, invisible job for the quoted product and quantity, schedules it with the real engine, reads off the dates and the allocated work hours, prices them, and then deletes the temporary job. Nothing is written to the production schedule. That is why you can simulate freely: the answer is capacity-aware but the floor is untouched.

A worked example: the same job, two answers

Acme Industries asks for 200 units of Widget-A. Widget-A routes through Saw-1, then CNC-Mill-1 (setup 1.0 h plus 0.50 h per unit, so 101 hours for this order), then Assembly-1. CNC-Mill-1 is the pace-setter.

The rule of thumb says "milled part, add four weeks," so the salesperson quotes four weeks from today with no further thought.

The simulation tells a different story, because CNC-Mill-1 already carries 320 hours of other committed Acme work that same window. EDGEBIC places the quoted milling step into the gaps that remain after that backlog, respects the Day Shift calendar, and returns:

Twenty-five days, not four weeks of guesswork. And critically, that 25-day window is one the mill can honor, because it was built around the mill's real backlog. Had the shop been quiet, the same 151 hours might have cleared in a week and the simulation would have said so, letting you win the order on speed. The rule of thumb would have missed both cases.

For the full mechanism behind that date, see how a quote simulation produces a realistic date, and when the quoted job routes through the same constraint machine as your committed work, the bottleneck is what sets the promised date.

Work hours, not wall-clock hours

One detail protects the cost side of the quote. The simulation reports estimated work hours, not the calendar span between start and end. A job that starts Friday afternoon and finishes Monday morning spans roughly 66 clock hours but may contain only six hours of actual work. EDGEBIC sums the allocated work hours from the simulated schedule, so the 151.50 above is real labor content, and the cost built on it is not inflated by nights and weekends the machine sat idle.

This is why a capacity-aware quote is both more honest on the date and more accurate on the price. The quote simulation computes cost from the schedule it just built: labor from work hours times each work center's rate, material from material steps or the unit-cost fallback.

Why this beats a rule of thumb every time

A lead-time rule answers "how long does this kind of job usually take?" A capacity simulation answers "given everything on the floor right now, when will this job finish?" Those are different questions, and only the second one keeps a delivery promise.

The simulation also updates itself. Capacity moves daily, so a promise date is a point-in-time snapshot. If work-center rates or capacity change after you simulate, the quote view shows a banner telling you to refresh and re-run before you send. A rule of thumb never knows the world moved.

The practical rule is simple: simulate before you send, every time. A quote priced from a routing estimate alone ignores current shop load. The simulation is the only number that includes it. When you are ready to explore the full workflow from enquiry to shipped order, start with the EDGEBIC quoting guide, and see the product in full on the EDGEBIC platform overview.

The payoff

Quoting against real capacity turns the quote from a hopeful estimate into a commitment the shop can stand behind. You stop over-promising when the bottleneck is buried and stop under-promising when it is open. You catch "we cannot hit that date" before the customer does, while there is still time to explore a second shift, an alternate work center, or a negotiated date. And every quote you send carries the credibility of a date that was built the same way the real schedule is built.

The rule of thumb was always a placeholder for information you did not have. EDGEBIC gives you that information in one click, without disturbing a single job on the floor.