Cost intelligence: knowing the true should-cost before you decide
Should-cost is the most powerful tool in procurement and the least used, because doing it by hand is slow. By the time a manual cost model is built, the quote deadline has passed. Cost intelligence is should-cost made fast enough to use on every decision, not just the strategic few.
The problem
A proper should-cost model means decomposing a part into its material, labour, tooling, freight and margin components, then pricing each against current data. Done well, it takes an experienced analyst one to two hours per part. For a 100-line bill of materials, that is weeks of work, so it never happens at line-item scale.
The result is that most buying decisions are made on relative comparison: this quote versus that quote, this year versus last year. Relative comparison tells you which option is cheaper. It does not tell you whether any of them is fair. You can pick the lowest of three quotes that are all 20% over should-cost and feel like you won.
How Agent Midas helps
Agent Midas builds a full should-cost stack for a single part or an entire BOM in seconds. It identifies the material and grade, prices it against live commodity data, layers in regional labour and process costs, and returns a defensible fair price for every line, with the assumptions visible so you can adjust them.
Because it runs at BOM scale, cost intelligence becomes a default input rather than a special project. Every quote can be checked against an independent baseline before it is approved, and the parts that are quietly overpriced surface automatically instead of hiding inside a long parts list.
Worked example
A buyer receives a 142-line engine-mount BOM from a fabricator, quoted at $318,000 for the annual build. Manually should-costing it is out of the question, so historically it would be approved on the strength of a 3% year-on-year increase that looks normal.
Run through Agent Midas, the BOM resolves in under a minute. Most lines are fair. But seven machined aluminium parts are 22–31% over should-cost, accounting for $41,000 of the total. The increase was not spread evenly, it was concentrated where the buyer was least likely to look.
Armed with the line-level breakdown, the buyer challenges only those seven parts, recovers about $28,000, and approves the rest with confidence. The cost intelligence did not just save money; it told the buyer exactly where to spend their negotiating energy.
See it on your own quotes.
A 20-minute walkthrough with a real buyer — bring a quote or a BOM.
Meet Agent Midas →