Run at rate
A demonstration, usually witnessed by the customer, that the process holds its quoted cycle and quality at full production pace.
A run at rate is where optimistic quoting goes to be discovered. The buyer arrives, the clock starts, and the cell has to produce good parts at the pace the quote promised, for long enough that nobody can call it a sprint. Every second of daylight between the quoted cycle and the demonstrated one becomes a negotiation, and it is a negotiation you enter having already signed the price.
On the floor the event behaves like an audit of the estimate rather than of the operators. The cycle that was quoted from the best hour the machine ever ran fails here, publicly, because a shift includes tool changes, gauging, chip problems and the operator’s second machine, and the demonstration is long enough to catch them. Floors that quote from measured history walk into a run at rate calm, because the number being tested is the number the cell already runs. Floors that quote from hope spend the week before the event re-engineering the process to meet their own estimate, which is process improvement at gunpoint.
It costs money in the permanent version of the miss. If the demonstrated cycle lands 10 percent over the quoted one, the price does not move, so the margin absorbs the difference for the life of the program, the compounding walked through in what a burdened rate actually includes. The protective habit is cheap. Quote cycles the floor has already held, state the cycle boundary, and treat the release quantities on the schedule as the pace that will be tested, because on program work it will be, with the customer watching.