If your margins depend on what you pay for materials or parts, last month's price is already out of date. Most teams suspect they overpay on some orders and don't have the hours to check which ones.
Contractors, manufacturers, repair shops and distributors quote jobs on what steel, cable or a part cost the last time someone looked. By the time the order goes in, the price has often moved, and when it moves up, the difference comes out of the margin on a job you've already sold.
Checking more suppliers more often would solve it, but the work doesn't scale. Looking up one item across ten supplier sites takes a while. Doing it for a few hundred items every day is a full-time job, so in practice it happens once a quarter, or when someone remembers.
Most companies buy from suppliers they know, because the account is set up and the rep answers the phone. Someone keeps a price spreadsheet that was accurate the day it was made. Big orders get a round of calls, and small orders, which add up over a year, go wherever is fastest.
That's a reasonable habit when prices are expensive to collect. The cost still shows up as a little extra on each order, too small to notice on any single invoice.
When nobody has time to compare prices, the business still pays for it, a few dollars at a time in the margin on each order.
RPA (robotic process automation) is software that does on a website what a person would do, on a schedule. For purchasing, that means a bot that visits each supplier's site, looks up the items you buy, reads the current price and records it.
Each morning your team opens one screen and sees, for every material, the cheapest source today and how it compares with what you paid last time. The bot also covers the small suppliers that people tend to skip.
We built this on one project. A bot checks more than 30 vendor sites every day and pulls the current price of each material, so the business sees the cheapest source and the best offer for each item without anyone browsing a catalog. The details are in our case study.
Once current prices live in your system, quotes and budgets can use them directly, and the number you give a client reflects this week's costs. Purchasing can get an alert when an item you buy often jumps in price, and estimates no longer rely on someone remembering what things used to cost.
On that same project, the pricing data became something customers wanted. The business opened a client portal that let its own customers use the same price sourcing, and sales rose 35% in the first year from that feature.
Bring a list of the items you buy most, the suppliers you use or would consider, and a rough idea of how you order today. Most supplier sites can be read by a bot. Some need a login, which works as long as you have an account, and a few block automated access. We'll tell you which ones before any work starts.
We begin with the items where price swings hurt most and show you the savings on your own purchase orders before you commit to adding more.
If your team buys materials or parts every week and can't keep up with price changes, book a call. Tell us what you buy and from where, and we'll tell you whether a price bot makes sense and what it would take to build.