01
“What should we ask suppliers to provide?”
Specify the cost breakdown, quantities, revision and charging conventions before quotes arrive, so offers can be examined on consistent assumptions.
Axiocost · Cost Engineering · in development
Is the cost — and the decision — defensible?
For industrial purchasing and cost-engineering users facing quotations that are hard to compare, cost assumptions that are hard to inspect, or a price-change request that needs a reviewable answer.
Interactive example on fictional data. The recorded workflow below is a replay. This email link opens your email application. Please do not attach confidential drawings or quotations before agreeing an appropriate sharing route.
Who it is for
Buyers, cost engineers and process specialists who need to explain a purchasing decision, not only to pick the lower unit price.
When to use it
Two quotations that do not cover the same work, a quantity or process assumption that changes the answer, or a supplier price-change request. The current pilot hypothesis is non-safety-critical molded components. That scope belongs to this offer.
What the review should produce
Intended scope, not a claim that every function is available today: a traceable comparison, explicit assumptions and exclusions, discrepancies to examine, and questions for the next review.
Explore an example
An interactive quote comparison on fictional data, and a recorded buyer-decision workflow. The journey is a recorded replay: corrections and decisions in that recording were written into the scenario. The page does not recalculate them.
Current scope and limits
The public demonstration does not read drawings, run a general should-cost estimator, or connect to a live price index. It does not include a cost-breakdown or index engine, supplier contact, live negotiation, sourcing-event launch, award, purchase-order creation or an approval service, and it does not approve a live operational decision. Connections to enterprise systems remain to be built. Accuracy on real industrial data has not been assessed.
A cost-review conclusion can inform an implementation review in Value Delivery. The public recordings use different scenarios and do not share a request or supplier record. The website shows only a recording of the buyer-decision replay; the code does not run here.
The questions behind a purchasing decision
From one quote
to the purchasing decision.
Comparing two prices is one moment in a longer process. The method we are developing addresses four questions buyers face before, during and after a quotation.
02
“Does this price increase make sense?”
Identify the cost lines it affects, their share of the price, the supporting evidence and what remains unexplained.
03
“What could we change to improve the economics?”
Explore feasible options—specification, process, batch plan, logistics or commercial terms—each with the person who must approve it and the evidence it needs.
04
“What exactly am I being asked to approve?”
See the recommendation, the excluded and incomplete offers, the assumptions that drive the result and what changed since the previous analysis.
These are areas addressed by the developing method, not four working software modules. The public demo illustrates one piece of them: comparing fictional quotes on a declared scope.
Our intended workflow
From an existing request
to a decision you can inspect.
01
Request
Start from the purchase request already in your system.
02
Route
Choose the right review: existing contract, new sourcing, missing information, exception or prior review.
03
Evidence
Make offers comparable: revision, quantity, scope and charges.
04
Analyse
Declared-scope economics, cost drivers and feasible options.
05
Decide
The buyer approves, rejects or corrects, with the reasoning visible.
06
Hand off
Return the reviewed decision to your existing system.
This is the intended sequence, not a description of today’s software. Your purchasing systems remain the record of requests, approvals and orders; Axiocost is meant to improve the analysis and review between those steps, not to replace them. No live connector or approval service exists: the method’s reference workflow uses a simulated destination. The interactive demo covers part of steps 03 and 04; a recorded replay follows one fictional request through all six, ending at that simulated destination.
Design direction. Built around reviewable decisions: buyers, engineers and finance teams contribute their expertise without losing the history of what changed and why. A commercial judgment is recorded as a judgment, not as a corrected cost fact, and changing a policy requires its owner. The public site does not manage roles or permissions.
A quotation, cost assumption or price-change request that is difficult to explain.
Discuss one case. If comparison is already automated, a useful pilot compares the current process with and without this review, including engineering and finance time, not only the buyer’s.
Discuss a Cost Engineering pilotThis link opens your email application. Please do not attach confidential drawings or quotations before agreeing an appropriate sharing route.