Management Consulting
Improving product-level margin visibility for a food manufacturer
Challenge
A mid-sized Victorian snack producer was manufacturing over 30 core products weekly plus up to 100 more on rotation. Their spreadsheet-based costing system couldn't keep pace, forcing the finance team to price using averages instead of true costs. Without accurate data, the business risked making margin decisions without visibility.
Solution
Nexus Point developed a custom costing system tailored to their operations and data sources. We:
- Extracted and reconciled data from eight internal systems to build an integrated dataset.
- Worked with production teams to map cost drivers at batch level.
- Built a costing engine that allocates every expense including labour, materials, utilities and depreciation directly to products.
- Enabled in-house staff to maintain and update the tool as product lines evolve.
Results
- Delivered item-level cost visibility accurate within 2%.
- Reduced monthly reporting time from two days to a few hours.
- Supported pricing changes that lifted gross profit by four percentage points.
- Enabled real-time scenario modelling for better batch sizing and supplier negotiations.
This custom solution gave the business the clarity it needed to protect margins and make confident decisions at scale.
