Profitability Analytics for Make-to-Order Manufacturing
The profitability picture your ERP is hiding
Your orders look profitable. Your customers look profitable. But indside both, your margin is silently draining away.
We'll show you where.
Unlocking profitability for
You know your numbers. But do you know what's inside them?
Revenue, margin, throughput - your reports are painting a picture that looks broadly on track.
But you can't shake a feeling that certain customers cost more to serve, and that certain orders never make what they should.
That somewhere, margin is being left on the table - but you can't point to where.
There's a name for what you're feeling
" In complex make-to-order manufacturing, there's almost always more recoverable margin than anyone realises. The data exists. But the way your systems capture it means the real picture is never visible. It’s what we call Profit Anopia ."
- Lance Tylor, Founder & CEO, ActionKPI
Profit Anopia isn't a failure of your team or your systems, but an inevitable consequence of complexity at scale.
When you're building hundreds of orders from thousands of component parts and serving hundreds of customers with wildly different cost-to-serve profiles, no ERP joins it all up at the level that would make the truth visible.
The result is margin erosion you never intended — accumulating quietly across orders and customers, invisible in the aggregate.
The good news is once you can see it, you can act on it.
We've spent years solving exactly this problem
ActionKPI is an FP&A consulting practice, specialising in profitability analytics for MTO manufacturing.
We're a thought partner to ambitious CFOs looking to make an outsized impact on business performance.
We help them go beyond standard financial reporting to understand their true margin at the order and customer level. We build the profitability picture that sits across their ERP, CRM, and operational data — a view no single system was designed to produce.
See it for yourself
Jesse Nelson is the CFO of Pearson Packaging Systems, a $100m+, make-to-order manufacturer, serving Fortune 500 companies.
This is what happened when he could finally see Pearson’s true profitability picture.
"We can see a higher EBITDA as a percentage of revenue, and cash generation than you would normally see because of the visibility and the ability to manage the business. Our cash cycles are improving. Working capital is improving. Inventories coming down."
- Jesse Nelson, Chief Financial Officer, Pearson Packaging Systems
Make more from what you already have
Instead of...
- Wondering which customers are genuinely worth serving
- Assuming your most complex orders are making money
- Explaining variance after the fact
- Leaving margin on the table without knowing it
You'll...
- Know for certain which relationships are truly profitable
- See where the margin drains on every project, across your manufacturing cycle
- Get ahead of issues before they hit your P&L
- Make more money from the business you already have
Uncover and prioritize your most valuable customers
"Being able to be this surgical and precise about what customers we choose to service, is a huge advantage (no one else can do it in our industry), which means we focus on all the best customers and allow our competitors to fight for the low profitability ones, because they're not able to identify those differences like we are."
- Taylor Carcasole, Director of Strategy, Hi-Pro Feeds
Reveal your most costly profit blind spots
Every MTO manufacturer has them. Most never find out where they are.
In just three minutes and eleven questions, understand where your profit visibility breaks down - across your order economics and your customer economics.
Get an instant results report showing where your significant blind spots are and how they're likely costing you.
