WHAT HAPPENS IF SOMETHING CHANGES?
Simulation Costing
A tariff, an exchange rate, a material price, an activity rate. PLP finds every product the change touches, re-costs them together in one pass, ranks what drives the difference, and tracks the measures that close it.
If this changes, what happens to cost and margin —and to how much of the portfolio?
Cost controlling owns this. These are products already in production, with the design long since settled; what moves is the world around them. Procurement is in the room when the change is a purchase price, treasury when it is a currency.
Three challenges
The cost you have is an inventory value
It comes from structures maintained for production planning, and it values semi-finished and finished materials for the balance sheet. It is not a read on what a tariff next month does to margin.
Nobody knows what's affected
A material moves and the first job is finding every product that contains it — which is a query nobody can run.
Every what-if is a new spreadsheet
Each scenario is a manual copy of the last one, and by the third copy none of them reconcile.
How it works
Model the drivers, not the numbers
Every node carries its material or ingredient, its activity or process, its source, its currency and its price basis. The structure knows why each figure is what it is, which is what makes it simulatable.
Find what's affected, then re-cost it together
Where-used analysis finds every product containing the material, activity or supplier that moved, builds a scope from them, and re-costs the whole scope in one pass rather than one product at a time.
Rank it,
then close it
Drivers ordered by how much of the difference each one accounts for, with alternative materials, suppliers and processes attached to the ones worth acting on — and the measures you decide on assigned, tracked and measured against actuals until the gap closes.
A tariff lands.
Which products just stopped working?
A tariff is applied to a component group. Where-used finds every product that contains it, the whole scope is re-costed together, and the result comes back ranked by exposure.
23 of 140
Costed in one pass Every level resolves as its children land
One pass
The scope re-costed together, not product by product
+ 6.2%
worst case Ranked, with the driver visible on every line
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.
