Blkbrd671 wrote:Manocad wrote:Blkbrd671 wrote:
Excel is easy money, i got that finance background
Need a job? PM me your info.
is this for the pistons? or for your personal business
No, for the company I work for, a global multi-billion dollar supplier of exhaust systems for cars, commercial trucks, farm equipment, big generators, etc.
When we quote a product to Ford, GM, Chrysler, Mercedes, BMW or whomever, the customer always has their own breakdown form that you have to complete that shows the purchased parts/materials, steps in the manufacturing process with machine/labor rates, overheads, SG&A, profit, etc. All the automotive manufacturers set their own allowable percentage limits for overhead rates, SG&A, and profit. Simply put, they want you the supplier to only make the profit they allow even if you've got the lowest cost, so they can get the rest. For example, your two competitors quoted $100 for a product with an 8% profit margin. You can do it better and cheaper and a $95 sell price for you gives you a profit margin of 15%. The customer wants you to only make 8% profit max and expects you to sell the product to them for $89 so they can put that $6 difference between what you would normally quote and what they will allow in their pocket rather than it being in yours. Which is horsebleep. If you've got the lowest price in the market because you're the best at what you do, the customer should be happy they got the lowest market price regardless of your profit margin (all other things being equal to your competitors of course, i.e. quality of part, timing, logistics cost, etc.).
Obviously we the supplier are not going to live with an $89 sell price if we know that $95 is the best price in the market and can still win us the business. So when we take our cost information and have to input it into the customer breakdown, we have to manipulate it to show that our sell price is $95 but reflects the customer's allowable 8% profit margin. That's basically what this job is. And since our cost breakdown is in a different format than the customer's, it's not just copy/pasting from one Excel file to another and fluffing a cost to get it to where it needs to be. What makes this a very time-consuming task is that the customer breakdowns are very detailed and we often are quoting full exhaust systems for multiple engines going into multiple cars, each with different architectures available for each car, e.g. coupe, sedan, wagon, etc. So there could be up to three parts per car, with all of those parts having different content for the coupe vs. the sedan vs. the wagon. We just did a global quote that involved 54 different parts, all with different prices due to different content in each part. So we had to do 54 different customer cost breakdowns. Most of the time spent is on the data entry step, but then the logical manipulation to get the price you want has follow. Hence it not just being a data entry clerk job.
