"It is estimated that over $690 billion dollars are lost each year by American businesses alone due to ineffective commodity costs management"
Institute for Advance Purchasing Studies

Product Cost Analysis

  Background

When a company spends billions each quarter on hundreds of thousands of different parts from tens of thousands of vendors spread throughout the world, it can be a daunting task to explain variances in planned versus actual expenditure of funds.


  Challenge

Identify and explain variances between forecasted costs and actuals based on mountains of available data pulled from sources throughout the company.


  Solution

Alliance Data consultants developed cost analysis tools for corporate finance users which provided a friendly analytical interface to access vast amounts data consisting of actual and forecast costs for procured parts, and actual and planned procurement volume data for hundreds of thousands of parts.


  Results

Corporate financial analysts were able to use ADC's tools to slice and dice cost data and isolate the sources of variance in actual versus planned expenditures. For the first time, variance in product cost could be easily and quickly identified and classified as caused by change in purchase price or by a variance in planned purchase volume.