Costing a manufacturer in real time, not in arrears

A family-owned food manufacturer running more than 55 SKUs across seven product categories, built on a raw-material base of roughly 130 inputs across sixteen categories.

Costing sat downstream of everything and moved slowest. Purchase prices changed, recipes were revised and customer-specific variants multiplied, but the cost of a given pack was reconstructed by hand each time somebody needed it. Pricing decisions were therefore made against a picture of the business that was always a little out of date.

A costing platform with purchases as the single source of truth. A price recorded once flows through to batch cost, cost per piece and cost per pack without anybody rebuilding the chain.

Recipes are versioned immutably, so a cost can always be traced back to the exact formulation and the exact purchase prices that produced it. Customer-specific variants are held as first-class objects rather than spreadsheet forks. Access runs on defined roles, so the people who set prices and the people who record purchases are not the same permission.

Output rose to 2.5 times the previous level against the same team, and operating efficiency, measured as output against total input, to 2.9 times. Roughly 150 hours a week came back to the business, most of it from work that had been reconstructing numbers that the system now holds.

The more durable change is that costing stopped being a periodic exercise. It became a property of the operating data, available at the moment a pricing decision is actually made.