Standard cost said one thing. The line said another.
This is what we would actually do, in what order, and what it costs.
No discovery call is required to see the number.
What we would go looking for
These are patterns that recur in manufacturing, written as things to
look for. They are not findings from a named engagement.
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.
The sequence
Five weeks for one operating unit. More units run in parallel rather than in
series, so a group does not take five times as long.
Week 1
Intake and reconciliation7 requests written for manufacturing, alongside the 107 covering the operating spine. We tell you which findings the gaps will limit before any fieldwork starts.
Weeks 2–3
Full pass, not a sampleEvery part in scope is read rather than sampled.
Week 4
Quantification and challengeEach finding sized, and put to whoever owns it before it is written down.
Week 5
Report and walkthroughThe written report, ranked by annual value and by how hard each finding is to act on.
3 core requests written for manufacturing, inside the full intake.
Anything you do not have can be skipped with a reason — skipping narrows what the
review can conclude, and we tell you where before the work starts rather than after.
Bills of material and standard costs — With the last time standards were refreshed.
Yield, scrap and rework by line
Inventory by category and age — Including obsolete and slow-moving.
If any of this is already happening
The review is always worth doing and rarely urgent. It becomes urgent when
something else is happening — and if one of these is, the sequence above compresses
to fit it.
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 needs to be in the room
Signs it: President, owner or CFO
Will resist it: Estimating and the plant manager, whose numbers become comparable — worth telling them what the
review is for before they hear it from somewhere else.
Has been asking for it: The controller, who cannot currently prove which parts earn
What it costs
Priced by operating unit — an entity, a location, or a business the accounts are
kept separately for. The second unit costs less than the first because by then the
intake is built, the chart of accounts is understood and the patterns are known.
Purchase order is the primary route — most
buyers this size raise a PO and pay against an invoice on terms. Card and bank
transfer exist for those who prefer them.