MANUFACTURING · MARGIN INTELLIGENCE
Automate SKU margin, direct spend and working capital for manufacturers
Three plants, three ERPs, three part numbers for the same item, and a margin report that stops at gross. OutcomeCatalyst normalises every part across your plants, rebuilds margin after freight, rebates and returns, finds the line that constrains everything else, and shows you the cash sitting on your shelves.
Margin intelligence, in plain terms
A manufacturer with three plants runs three ERPs, and the same physical part carries a different part number in each. That single fact is why nobody can answer what a part costs, what a customer is really worth, or which line is holding back the whole plant. Margin intelligence joins them and answers all three.
From three ERPs to one number, in four steps
No migration, no consolidation project, and no change to how any plant runs day to day.
Why this matters in mid-market manufacturing
Multi-plant manufacturers are usually the product of acquisition, and each acquisition arrived with its own ERP, its own part numbering and its own supplier relationships. Consolidating those systems is a multi-year project that rarely finishes and never pays back on the schedule promised, so most operators live with the fragmentation permanently.
The cost of living with it is specific. Procurement negotiates plant by plant against suppliers who see the whole account, which means the supplier has better information than the buyer. Two of your own plants bidding separately for the same part is not a rare edge case, it is the default outcome of the structure.
Margin reporting has the same blind spot in a different place. Gross margin is calculated at the invoice, but freight, rebates, returns and expedites land afterwards in different ledgers. A customer can be your largest by revenue and your worst by contribution, and the standard margin report will never show it.
On the floor, capacity is misunderstood in a way that costs capital. Plants buy another line because throughput is short, when the constraint is a single cell running at under half its potential. The downtime reasons that would prove it are written in shift notes rather than captured as data.
Built for the stack a plant actually runs
These are the systems referenced in the workflow above. Anything with an API, a database or an export can be connected, including controls and historians on the floor.
Questions plant owners and operators ask first
Do we have to consolidate our ERPs first?
No, and that is the point. Consolidation is the project most manufacturers cannot finish. This reads each plant where it stands and reconciles parts and costs on top, so you get the joined view without the migration.
How is this different from our BI or margin reports?
A margin report is accurate about what the invoice said. It cannot include the freight bill that arrived two weeks later in a different ledger, or the rebate accrued at quarter end, or the credit memo for a return. Those are what separate booked margin from kept margin.
How do you match parts across plants without a common code?
By specification rather than by code. Descriptions, dimensions, supplier part numbers and unit-of-measure are reconciled, and low-confidence matches are surfaced for a human to confirm rather than assumed. Your engineers see the match before it is used.
Will this disrupt production or touch the controls?
No. Machine data is read from the historian or MES, not written to. Nothing on the floor is controlled, adjusted or interrupted, and the plant runs exactly as it did before.
Our third plant runs a system from the 1990s. Is that a problem?
It is common and usually workable. Older systems almost always expose a database, a scheduled report or a flat-file export, and any of those is enough. It is often the plant with the most trapped value precisely because nobody has looked.
How long before we see a number we trust?
Most engagements are live on a first workflow in four to six weeks. Direct-spend price spreads are the usual starting point because they are verifiable against invoices you already have, which makes the result easy to check independently.
Who owns the decision to reprice or consolidate?
Your team, always. The system produces the comparison, the draft supplier request and the supporting documents. Procurement and commercial leadership decide what to send and what to accept.
Does this replace our ERP or our planning system?
No. It reads from them and writes findings back, so buyers, planners and controllers keep working in the systems they know. There is no new interface to adopt and no data leaves your control if you deploy in your own environment.
AI margin intelligence for manufacturers: common questions
What is margin intelligence?
It is one system that reads every plant ERP, supplier invoice and quote email, normalises part numbers so the same item reads the same way everywhere, rebuilds customer margin after cost to serve, measures OEE to find the real constraint, and ages inventory so you can see which cash is releasable.
Where does the data come from?
From what a plant already runs. SAP and NetSuite hold orders and the ledger, Coupa holds purchase orders, and supplier invoices hold what you actually paid. Rockwell and Siemens controls plus the historian carry machine runtime, and shift notes carry why a line really stopped.
How is this different from our ERP?
An ERP is accurate about one plant. It cannot tell you the same bearing costs 28% more at Plant 2, because each plant carries its own part number and the quote that set the price arrived by email. This joins them and shows the spread.
