Manufacturing · Proposed Use Case
A proposed engagement to connect production systems with financials, delivering real-time unit costing, faster quoting, and proactive margin alerts.
The challenge
This mid-size manufacturer runs production through Katana for shop-floor scheduling and Unleashed for inventory and supplier management, while all financials live in MYOB. The true cost of producing a single unit is not known until the month-end close, when the finance team manually consolidates raw material costs, labour hours, machine time, and overheads across all three systems. By the time the numbers are available, the production run is long finished and the opportunity to adjust has passed.
The disconnect between production and financials creates serious problems for the sales team. When a customer requests a quote for a custom order, the quoting process involves pulling historical costs from MYOB, checking current material prices in Unleashed, and estimating production time from Katana - a process that can take days and still produces unreliable figures. Sales staff frequently resort to padding margins generously to avoid underquoting, which costs the company competitive bids.
Margin erosion is another silent threat. Supplier price increases, machine downtime, and material waste all eat into profitability, but these impacts are invisible until month-end reporting. By then, the manufacturer may have completed an entire production run at a loss without anyone raising an alarm. There is no mechanism for proactive intervention when costs start to drift.
The solution
DataSpec would build a real-time costing engine that continuously pulls production data from Katana, material and supplier costs from Unleashed, and financial actuals from MYOB. Rather than waiting for month-end reconciliation, cost-per-unit would be calculated as production happens - incorporating actual material consumption, recorded labour hours, and current overhead allocations.
For quoting, DataSpec would provide the sales team with a live cost model for any product configuration. Current material prices, recent production efficiency rates, and up-to-date overhead rates would feed into an automated costing template. What currently takes days of cross-referencing would be reduced to minutes, with far greater accuracy. The sales team would be able to quote confidently, knowing their margins are based on today's costs rather than last month's averages.
DataSpec would also implement automated margin alerts. When the actual cost of a production run begins to deviate from the expected cost - whether due to supplier price movements, higher-than-normal scrap rates, or increased machine downtime - the system would flag the deviation immediately. Operations and finance would receive proactive notifications before a full run is completed at compromised margins.
Expected results
With real-time unit costing in place, the manufacturer would gain continuous visibility into production economics rather than waiting for month-end surprises. Finance would be expected to close the books faster, and operations would have the data needed to optimise production scheduling and material purchasing on an ongoing basis.
The quoting process is expected to accelerate by more than 70%, transforming a multi-day exercise into a matter of minutes. More accurate quotes would improve win rates on competitive bids while protecting margins on custom orders. The sales team would no longer need to choose between speed and accuracy.
Proactive margin alerts would serve as an early warning system, expected to catch cost overruns while there is still time to intervene. Whether it is a sudden spike in raw material prices or an uptick in production waste, the operations team would be notified in hours rather than discovering the impact weeks later in a P&L report.
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