Standard cost said one thing. The line said another.

“That job was quoted at thirty points. It cannot have come in at nine.”

Product margin is calculated from standards, and standards are refreshed less often than anyone admits. When they drift, every downstream decision — what to quote, what to promote, what to discontinue — is made on numbers that stopped being true.

standard cost
yield
scrap and rework
OEE
BOM
obsolescence
accessorials
takt

Your words, not ours.

Where it concentrates here

Five places the money tends to go in manufacturing. Each one is concentrated — a single agreement, a single queue, a single account nobody reviews — which is why sampling walks straight past them.

Standard costs last genuinely rebuilt several years ago, so reported margin by product is a well-formatted guess.
Scrap and rework booked to a variance account that is reviewed in total and never by line, so a single bad process hides inside an acceptable aggregate.
Freight accessorials — detention, demurrage, fuel, redelivery — turning a negotiated rate into a materially different paid rate.
Obsolete stock carried at cost because writing it down needs an authorization nobody wants to sign.
A single-source component with no alternate qualified, priced accordingly and reviewed never.

Not every manufacturing is the same business

Precision machining and fabricationQuoted from cycle times that improved or degraded years ago, on parts whose revisions changed without the price being revisited.
Medical device and componentsDesign history files, validation and lot traceability, where the cost of quality is real and is buried in overhead.
Packaging and printSubstrate cost passed through unevenly, and make-ready waste absorbed into a standard that was set at a different run length.
Contract and private labelCustomer-supplied specifications, customer-owned tooling and customer-driven changes, priced as though none of those cost anything.
Plastics, moulding and extrusionResin priced on an index and quoted on a memory, with scrap rates that vary by tool and are reported in aggregate.

Where this data actually lives

Epicor Kinetic, Global Shop, JobBOSS or E2 in the mid-market; SAP Business One or NetSuite where finance led the choice
A shop-floor data collection layer that is only as good as the labor tickets actually clocked against it
A separate quality system holding the CAPA and non-conformance record
Estimating in a spreadsheet the ERP does not know about, which is where the quoted cost and the real cost first diverge

Named because it changes what the intake asks for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them rather than surprised by them.

Reported in your numbers, not ours

gross margin by part
standard vs actual cost
scrap and rework
OEE
on-time delivery
quote win rate
inventory turns
cost of poor quality

The obligations that set the deadlines

ISO 9001, and ISO 13485 for device work — with the audit findings and whether they closed
FDA registration and listing where applicable, and the QSR/QMSR record
PPAP and first article submissions to customers who require them
EPA and state environmental reporting on emissions, waste and solvents
Customer supplier scorecards, which is how the customer measures you rather than how you measure yourself

What the review would ask you for

7 requests written for manufacturing and asked of nobody else — 3 of them core. They sit alongside the operating spine every business has — finance, revenue, receivables, payables, contracts, people, IT, operations, risk, commercial and governance — which is 107 further requests.

Bills of material and standard costs Core With the last time standards were refreshed.
Yield, scrap and rework by line Core
Equipment utilization and downtime With downtime reasons.
Inventory by category and age Core Including obsolete and slow-moving.
Inbound and outbound freight spend By lane and carrier.
Supplier terms and concentration Single-source dependencies especially.
Quality escapes, returns and warranty cost

Anything you do not have can be skipped in one click, with a reason. The intake is completed in the client portal, which saves each answer as it is given and can be returned to as often as you like.

When this stops being interesting and becomes urgent

A customer demanding a price reduction at renewal with no cost model to answer it
A quality escape, a recall or a customer audit finding
A quote win rate that fell and nobody can say which cost assumption caused it
An acquisition approach, where margin by part number is the first thing asked for
A key customer taking work in-house, exposing how much overhead they were carrying

Who this involves

Signs it: President, owner or CFO
Resists it: Estimating and the plant manager, whose numbers become comparable
Has been asking for it: The controller, who cannot currently prove which parts earn

Who commissions it

Operations directors, plant managers and CFOs. Phase one is priced before phase two is discussed, the report is yours either way, and we take no vendor commissions or referral fees on anything we recommend.

See the proposal and the price Talk it through first

The proposal sets out the sequence week by week, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your number of operating units. No call required to see the number.

Closest to this

Operations that share more with manufacturing than the sector label suggests.