A $50,000 mix opportunity in one day, without an analytics team

Threaded recently helped a growing pet treat manufacturer build intelligent reporting for their manufacturing plant. With dozens of SKUs running through the same line and only fragmented data available, the production manager was forced to run the schedule on a handful of numbers and a “gut feel.” This worked fine as long as production capacity wasn’t a constraint. They could simply extend or scale back production quantities based on sales. But it came to a head when they realized they were running at max capacity while trying to introduce new products.

Are the new products profitable? Are the old ones? High-volume products aren’t always high-profit products. How do you test new products while still prioritizing a strong backbone of high-volume, high-profit SKUs?

Yes, they had sales numbers they could pull from Shopify. Bills of Materials (BOM) lived in spreadsheets. Material costs were exported from accounting software. Leadership hoped they could run this analysis with the data they already had…but who had time available? Everyone in the factory was already stretched thin, and just coordinating everyone’s schedules to pull it together would take at least two weeks. Could the team even commit that time? And if they did, how long before the analysis went stale? None of these questions had good answers so they kept running on a few numbers and “gut feel.”

This is where Threaded changes that math. Threaded is an AI-enhanced manufacturing strategist and its Reports feature works like a state-of-the-art data analyst at a highly-approachable cost.

Within one day, Threaded mapped the pet treat manufacturing process, connected the disparate data exports, and synthesized it all into a fully costed Bill of Materials (material cost plus processing cost), then compared profitability against sales volume for every SKU. The analysis can update automatically on the cadence they need, so it stays fresh and accurate.

Fully costed bill of materials with material and processing costs for each product

That intermediate step, mapping the manufacturing process alongside real material costs, is what makes the product cost trustworthy. Every operation adds processing cost, and a cost based on materials alone would understate the true cost to make each SKU. This in combination with real sales volume provides a clear picture of which products are currently driving the business forward.

Product profitability compared against sales volume to identify which SKUs drive the business

This analysis would have previously taken weeks and only produced a single report with a one-time snapshot. Now this can be turned around significantly faster, stays current, and allows for digging deeper with Threaded AI to further improve operations. Data syncs from Shopify, accounting, Threaded, and Google Sheets without the need for tedious manual workflows. And the analysis worked: it revealed a production schedule optimization that could increase annual profit by $50,000. The manager’s gut knew this was possible, and now they have the reports to prove it.