If you want EBITDA governed, don’t start with a grand transformation. Start with truth: who actually produces your product, what actually drives the cost, and where variance is actually coming from.
Pareto is the shortcut to reality. Identify the ~20% of suppliers responsible for ~80% of volume. That is where your economics live. That is where governance should begin.
Get knowledge from where production happens
The organization rarely lacks spreadsheets. It lacks facts. The facts sit with vendors, sub-suppliers, and the people translating decisions into production. If the executive view is detached from that layer, “costing” becomes narrative.
When you reconnect to the source, you see the real drivers: material substitutions, yield, minimums, capacity constraints, calendar compression, freight decisions, compliance requirements, and the quiet costs that appear only after commitments harden.
Surface hidden costs early
Hidden costs are not mysterious. They’re simply outside the model. The model is what leadership chose to look at. OpenCosting’s job is to make the boundary explicit—and then expand it where it matters.
Early exposure is not “perfect” costing. It’s forcing assumptions into view while leverage exists. The goal is not detail; it’s control.
Analyze, don’t accumulate
Once the facts exist, analysis is the work. What explains margin movement? Which suppliers systematically break assumptions? Where does complexity amplify volatility? Which constraints are truly fixed, and which are merely habitual?
When this is done on the Pareto set, governance becomes practical. The organization learns where it actually has leverage—and where it’s already too late.
What you don’t see, you can’t improve. Governance starts by seeing clearly—then acting early.