Cost and margin reporting for multi-plant manufacturers
From your SAP data, every morning, on your phone.
d/dx reads your ERP overnight and works out what each plant and product cost to make, and what it earned. By 7am your team has a short briefing on what changed and why. Every figure ties back to your books.
Morning read · 07:00 Synced 02:14
Cost / MT
Live₹ 42,180
−2.4% vs prior 28 days
Plant KGF · Synced 02:00
Signals this morning 3
- Packing cost / MT · KGF Laminate rate revision +4.1%
- Energy cost / MT · BRD Grid outage, 14 hrs on DG +2.6%
- RM cost / MT · NGP New resin contract −1.9%
A band of sample figures from the app: cost, contribution and energy per tonne, plant codes, the nightly sync, and closed discussions. Synthetic data.
01 How it works
Your ERP data goes in overnight. A briefing comes out by morning.
d/dx has two parts: a server inside your network that processes your ERP data, and an app your team opens on their phone or desktop, with notifications. There is no new data entry for anyone.
-
01 · Once, at onboarding
Connect
d/dx is installed on a server inside your network and reads a copy of your SAP cost, production and sales data. Your live ERP is never touched.
-
02 · Every night
Compute
It works out 32+ cost and margin figures for every plant and every product, and checks that they add up to your books.
-
03 · Every morning
Read
Your team opens a short briefing on their phones: what changed overnight, where, and who is looking into it.
Most manufacturers hear about a cost problem at the monthly review. By then it is weeks old.
02 The monthly loop
A cost spike takes 30 to 60 days to reach the owner.
Most manufacturers report on a monthly cycle. Plants and departments build their decks after the books close, the review happens mid-month, and the board sees it later still. This is how one raw-material price increase usually travels.
Today
-
Day 2 A plant head notices raw-material cost has jumped.
-
Day 3–5 Word spreads over WhatsApp and phone calls.
-
Day 10–15 The month closes. The MIS team builds the review deck.
-
Day 15–20 Monthly review. The CFO and CEO hear about it officially.
-
Day 20–25 Corrective actions go out to the plants.
-
Day 30–45 The board or owners see it in their pack.
-
Day 60+ The fix takes effect, two months after the problem started.
With d/dx
-
Day 1 A Signal reaches everyone who owns that number.
-
Day 2 The cause is written on the number, and the thread is closed.
-
Numbers wait for the close.
Nobody trusts a cost figure until finance closes the month, usually around day 5 to 10.
-
Margin by SKU is guesswork.
Company margin is known. Margin for one product at one plant depends on how shared costs are split, so each team has its own version.
-
The explanation gets lost.
Why a number moved is discussed on WhatsApp and email. When it happens again next year, nobody can find what was said.
d/dx cuts the first part of that loop to a day or two. The monthly review still happens. It just starts from numbers everyone has already seen.
03 Signals
Each morning, a short list of what changed.
Overnight, d/dx compares every cost and margin figure, for every plant and product, against its own history. The few changes that are genuinely unusual become Signals. Each one says what moved, where, by how much, and which cost line drove it.
Seasonal swings and day-to-day noise are filtered out first. That keeps Signals rare enough that people still read them when they arrive as a notification.
Packing cost / MT · Plant KGF
+4.1% overnight
Driver
Laminate rate revision, effective 04 Jul
04 Drill-down
From the company total to one SKU in three taps.
Every figure is available at every level: company, division, plant, product family and SKU. Cost per tonne splits into raw material, packing, energy, labour and overhead, with last year alongside. Nobody has to ask the MIS team for a cut, or wait for next month’s pack.
Cost / MT · Drill-down
YoY
- Company ₹ 39,410 +1.2%
- Detergents ₹ 44,020 +2.8%
- Plant NGP ₹ 45,860 +3.1%
- SKU DTG-900G ₹ 47,120 −0.6%
Company → Division → Plant → Family → SKU
Priya Sharma
Cost Controller
on Energy cost / MT · Plant BRD
Grid outage Tuesday — DG ran 14 hrs. Flagging before the review.
- Reply
Answer on the metric itself.
- Resolve
Close it out. The thread stays.
- Search
Find it again in seconds.
05 Discussions
The explanation stays with the number.
The figures show what moved. Your people know why: a grid outage, a new vendor, a decision from Tuesday’s review. In d/dx they write it on the number itself, tagged to the plants and products it concerns. Tag a colleague to ask, and mark it resolved when it’s answered.
Purchasing, production and finance work in one thread instead of three WhatsApp groups. When the same thing happens next year, the history is still there, including for people who joined since.
06 Roles and access
Everyone sees the numbers they are responsible for.
Access is set by role, and discussions follow the same rules: nobody sees a thread about a plant they don’t run. You pay per plant, not per user, so adding people costs nothing.
-
Plant head
Their plant, the company average to compare against, and the discussions on their numbers.
-
Category head
Their product families, across every plant that makes them.
-
CFO and CEO
Everything: every plant, every SKU, every thread.
- Admin console
- Your own admin adds users, assigns plants, checks the nightly sync and sets alert thresholds, without raising a ticket with us.
- Sign-in
- Username and password, reachable only over your VPN. Single sign-on with Microsoft Entra ID is on the roadmap.
07 What changes
What it replaces, and what stays.
d/dx replaces
- Building the monthly MIS deck by hand
- The weekly Excel forms every plant and department fills in
- Most of the Power BI licences
- KPI reports mailed around as PDFs and slides
- WhatsApp and email threads about why a number moved
Stays, but lighter
- The monthly review. It gets shorter. Everyone has already seen the numbers, so the meeting is about what to do next.
- The review deck. It gets smaller: only the exceptions, for board and owner audiences.
- Board and owner reporting. Still a PDF, now built from the month’s data and the discussions on its biggest Signals.
08 Where it runs
Inside your network. Your data stays there.
d/dx is installed on a virtual machine that your IT team provides, inside your company network. It reads a copy of your ERP data, never the live system. Nothing is sent to us or to any cloud service.
Your team reaches it over your VPN. Phone notifications say a Signal is waiting; the figures stay on your server.
09 Getting started
Live on your SAP in weeks, one stage at a time.
Each stage is agreed in writing before it starts, and nothing is open-ended. The first stage looks at one month of your SAP data, so both sides know what the work involves before you commit to the rest.
- Stage 1 Scoping sprint 4–6 weeks Works from one month of your SAP data to understand how your data is organised and how complex the calculations will be. If you go ahead, it is credited in full to your first-year subscription.
- Stage 2 Onboarding One-time fixed fee Agreed in writing after scoping. d/dx is set up inside your network on a copy of your SAP data, and your first plants go live with success criteria in the contract, including reconciliation to your books. The rest follow.
- Stage 3 Annual subscription Yearly The platform, upgrades, support, and upkeep of your cost mapping as your SAP data changes. Optional modules are added when your data supports them.
The hard parts are ours. Mapping your cost codes, attributing revenue to plants and reconciling to your books is done and maintained by us, not your IT team.
The scoping sprint stands on its own. Whether or not you go ahead, you keep what it produces: your SAP data landscape documented, your cost codes mapped, and a written assessment of how complex your calculations will be.
10 In production
Running every day at an FMCG manufacturer in India since 2025.
- Factories
- 15+
- SKUs
- 1,000+
- SAP sync
- Nightly
Reference calls are available under NDA. We take on a few new deployments a year, and welcome multi-plant manufacturers beyond FMCG, including building materials, specialty chemicals and pharma.
Optional modules
Cost and margin is part of the base platform. Optional modules extend it on the same server and the same morning rhythm, as far as the data on your side allows.
- Primary sales
- Plan vs actual
- Procurement
- Working capital
- Secondary sales
- Quality
- Maintenance
- Promotions
11 Walkthrough
See it running.
A 30-minute walkthrough of the morning briefing, on simulated data. Tell us how many plants you run and on which ERP, and we’ll focus on the parts that apply to you.
Or use the form. Include your plant count and ERP, and we'll reply with a time and the specifics that apply to you.