WHAT WILL THIS COST?
Early Costing
Cost new products from the design. Missing prices are estimated by AI or entered by hand, and marked.
What will this cost, when there is no cost view yet?
Three challenges
The product isn't in ERP yet
It exists in PDM: a structure with nothing against it. The prices and rates that would value it are in ERP, attached to a product that has not been created there. Bridging the two is a manual job nobody owns.
It has been costed before, somewhere
Something close to this was costed eighteen months ago by someone who has since changed teams, in a file nobody can find.
Blind spots costed as zero
An incomplete structure quietly understates cost, and the missing piece shows up as a margin problem after launch.
How it works
Start from the structure, or from the nearest thing to it
If a bill of materials or recipe already exists — wherever it lives — PLP takes it. If nothing exists, it finds the closest comparable products and drafts a structure from them.
Bring the costs to it
PLP reaches into ERP for material and ingredient prices, activity rates, surcharges and overheads, joins them to the structure wherever that structure lives, and costs it node by node, rolling up as it goes.
Mark what had to be estimated
Missing values are imputed and flagged rather than quietly filled, and the flag travels upward — so at the root you can see whether a cost contains estimated values, not just at the leaf where the estimate was made.
A costing structure arrives complete in shape and empty of figures. The prices and activity rates that value it exist too. PLP joins the two and the structure fills from the leaves upward.
Costed in one pass Every level resolves as its children land
2 estimated Values with no history, marked — and still marked at the root
A range, not a point With the assumptions attached
In a plant this is a bill of materials and a routing. In a recipe house it is a recipe and its process steps.
Cost an existing structure Join a bill of materials or recipe that carries no cost to the costs that value it.
Draft by analogy Build a first-pass structure from the nearest comparable product.
Cost from a description Start from a requirements document or a customer enquiry.
Impute what is missing Fill gaps with values marked as estimates.
Estimates that travel The estimate flag propagates to the root, so nothing hides in a leaf.
Revision tracking What a change to the structure did to the cost, version against version.
What it needs
The shared line, plus: a requirements document or customer enquiry, where the costing starts from a description rather than a structure.
