Accelerated should-costing for a German aircraft manufacturer

Use Case:

Should-Costing

Department:

Sales

Industry:

Transport Manufacturing

Challenges:

• Scarce resources to provide quotes for custom parts.

Solution:

• BOM-centered approach for fast and precise should-costing tool
• Standardized process applicable to custom pieces
• Access to live data feed from thousands of worldwide data sources
• Secure online platform – easy to access and easy to use

Results:

• Better repartition of should-costing resources within the company
• Should-costing process time was reduced from 5-6 weeks to minutes
• Better consistency and reliability for quote proposal
• Short integration time and fast ownership of the solution

Correctly assessing part price is crucial

Being able to provide accurate estimations for products that are still in the pre-sales process can be a nightmare. The risk of losing potential clients for pricy quotes is combined with the necessity of setting fair prices that will allow the company to grow its profits.
Yet, very often this crucial step relies on vague estimations and rules-of-thumb.
Our client, a large German aircraft manufacturer, was confronted with this problem. As most of the pieces they produce are tailored-made, their only should-costing expert would have to review each sales opportunity to provide a quote, in a process that could take up to several weeks. This workflow would not be sustainable for the company, resulting in sales and benefits loss.

Start with a BOM, get complete should-cost for custom parts in minutes

Makersite uses a fundamentally new approach to should-costing, allowing the sales function to have a better understanding of product value in minutes instead of weeks, from a Bill Of Materials (BOM). No need to mobilize should-costing experts for each sales talk.

We start with a BOM, the document that usually starts sales conversations and reflects the unique structure of any manufactured product. After importing the BOM on the platform with a simple drag and drop, the document is decomposed, and each “leaf” of the document is mapped to live data feeds from thousands of data sources worldwide. The system then adds a layer of an algorithm that estimates the price of the product based on its structure, including the cost of the manufacturing processes involved on top of the raw materials.

Manufacturing costs and overheads are also considered: the system offers the possibility to create custom cost models for different countries to take into account country specificities like labor costs.