When a major order arrives in procurement, the margin is decided long before the first negotiation. A project bill of materials (BOM) with over a thousand line items must be priced reliably within two weeks, yet the necessary pricing data is scattered across ERP systems, document management, old projects, and email inboxes. HUBTEX demonstrates how to resolve this situation using an ongoing project as an example.

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Sebastian Vey (Head of Procurement at HUBTEX), together with Nils Borrmann (Engineering Lead at Tacto) and Moritz Boehm (Engineer at Tacto), joins Moritz Flick (Customer Development at Tacto) to discuss how to turn 1,380 BOM line items into a reliable project price and how to calculate the margin impact of pricing rounds in advance.

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The starting point for a major order: 74 units, 1,380 line items, two weeks to complete.

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Since 1981, HUBTEX has specialized in handling long, heavy, and bulky loads, manufacturing multi-directional forklifts and special vehicles—95 percent of which are electric—with lift capacities ranging from 1.5 to over 200 tons. The procurement team manages an annual order volume of approximately 50 million euros, spread across about 800 suppliers and 15,600 active items.

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For a recent project involving 74 identical units for the US market, a BOM with 1,380 line items landed in procurement. The requirement: negotiated and reliable prices within two weeks. It is precisely in this scenario that it is decided whether a calculation is based on current conditions or on references from an old project.

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The path to a project price requires looking at every single line item.

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The previous process began with a PDF export of the BOM from SAP, which was then converted into a structured Excel list using a Copilot prompt. Initially, this list contained only item numbers, descriptions, quantities, and total costs—no suppliers, no purchasing groups, and no current conditions. Everything else was manual research: checking all 1,300+ items for valid info records, searching for prices in quotes within the document management system, clarifying whether an item was still available, creating drawing sets, sending out inquiries, evaluating responses, and coordinating internally on discontinued parts.

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Sebastian Vey describes the consequence clearly: "A large part of the time is not spent on inquiries or negotiations, but on gathering data from various systems—from an ERP system, from the DMS, and on internal coordination." Under time pressure, the team focuses on the largest cost items. The rest is left untouched, potential savings in the BOM are not realized, and the final calculation is partially based on an incomplete data foundation.

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BOM intelligence in action: Price origin and currency for every line item.

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In the demo, the BOM is imported directly from the ERP or PLM system, eliminating the detour through Excel. Each line item is linked to existing procurement data and displays a price, along with its source and status. For a welded frame, historical suppliers are visible from transaction data, along with previous prices, lead times, and alternative suppliers from info records. A cylinder screw is flagged as outdated because its associated info record is two years old, and inquiries are sent to the identified suppliers at the push of a button.

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To prioritize effectively, the bill of materials can be sorted bottom-up by material cost and filtered to show items without prices. This allows the purchasing team to focus on the areas with the greatest impact and identify where quotes are actually missing, rather than treating every line item the same.

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Scenarios. From individual calculations to portfolio margin impact

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Within the project itself, Tacto accounts for volume and tiered pricing effects across all line items. Furthermore, scenarios can be projected across the entire sales portfolio: a rise in steel prices is calculated across all linked bills of materials, raw material drivers are automatically identified—for instance, from price increase notifications—and the impact on margins becomes visible for each product line. Lead times from master data are also integrated, allowing you to verify whether the recorded times align with the project scope and which alternative suppliers should be considered.

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Conclusion

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The HUBTEX case study demonstrates that the challenge isn't the availability of data, but access to it. The prices exist—in SAP, in past projects, and in drawings—but they aren't available at the push of a button. Once they are linked and structured, the effort shifts from research back to negotiation. Vey sums up the goal: "To eliminate this manual work, this searching for data, and focus on what we actually enjoy in purchasing: negotiating prices." The speed is also remarkable: only a few weeks passed between the first meeting in Fulda and the first project calculation.

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Sebastian Vey (Head of Purchasing at HUBTEX), together with Nils Borrmann and Moritz Boehm from Tacto, demonstrates how a project bill of materials with 1,380 items can be priced in days instead of weeks. They discuss the previous process involving PDF exports, Copilot, and manual price searches in ERP and DMS systems, as well as how to handle drawing parts without price references and how to visualize price updates, tiered effects, and the margin impact of a price round in advance. Includes a live demo using an ongoing major order for 74 units.