Sourcing & costing
Cut sample costing from days to minutes
A sourcing team was quoting from spreadsheets that no two people agreed on. We replaced the spreadsheets with a costing platform that reads the bill of materials directly.
| Component | Supplier | Unit | Cons. | Price | Extended |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Waffle knit 280gsm | Kestrel Mills | m | 1.420 | 4.850 | 6.887 |
| Rib collar 2×2 | Kestrel Mills | m | 0.180 | 3.200 | 0.576 |
| Main label, woven | Arnaud Trims | pc | 1.000 | 0.070 | 0.070 |
| Care + size label | Arnaud Trims | pc | 1.000 | 0.030 | 0.030 |
| Sewing thread | Arnaud Trims | cone | 0.040 | 1.900 | 0.076 |
| Polybag + carton | Verano Components | pc | 1.000 | 0.140 | 0.140 |
- Function
- Sourcing & costing
- Replaced
- Per-style spreadsheets
- Status
- In daily production use
- Owned by
- The client, from commit one
The problem
Every quote started as a copy of the last quote. A costing sheet was duplicated, edited for the new style, and emailed on — which meant the material prices inside it were whatever they had been on the day the original was built. Nobody could say when a number had last been checked.
Because each sheet was a private copy, the same component could carry three different prices across three live quotes, and there was no way to find out except by opening all three. Landed cost was calculated at the end, by hand, if at all — so quoted cost and the cost actually paid never met.
What we built
A costing platform where the bill of materials is a record rather than a document. Materials, components, labour and overhead each resolve against a priced supplier list, so a quote is assembled from current prices instead of inherited ones.
Landed-cost rollups sit in the same model — freight, duty and handling apply as rules rather than as a final manual adjustment. Costing the same style against a different supplier is a re-selection, not a rebuild.
How it landed
Costing a sample moved from a task measured in days — waiting on prices, chasing the current version of a sheet — to one measured in minutes. The larger change is that quotes now reconcile: the cost quoted and the cost paid are computed from the same records, so a gap between them is visible instead of invisible.
The platform is in daily use by the sourcing team that asked for it.
Anonymised by agreement. We'll walk you through the specifics — the system, the numbers, the parts that went wrong — on a call under NDA.