The costdata® commodity price tracker explained simply

The costdata® commodity price tracker is an analysis tool that helps you visualize how costs change over time. It is aimed at companies in the manufacturing industry that want to understand how individual cost components such as material costs, energy, or personnel can affect the total cost of a product.

Essentially, this is not about absolute prices, but rather about price trends and percentage changes over a defined period of time. The tracker is based on a very extensive benchmark database and transparently shows how your cost structures have changed.

What the Commodity Price Tracker can do

The commodity price tracker provides a structured market analysis for individual products or entire product groups. It shows you at a glance how much the total costs have changed over a selected period, for example, whether they have risen or fallen and how individual cost drivers have contributed.

Compared to simple price lists or older methods, this tool delivers comparable, up-to-date, and traceable results based on an API and benchmark database. This helps you evaluate price developments in a fact-based manner and use them strategically. An important advantage is the connection between data and analysis: you don't get loose figures, but ready-made market analyses that can be directly evaluated, saved, and exported.

How the commodity price tracker works

The structure of the tool can be divided into three logical steps:

1. Entering the basic data

First, select a viewing period . This period is used to calculate price trends and display changes over weeks, months, or years.

The basic data includes the product name or product group for analysis. Optionally, the product category can be added for filtering, as well as a company assignment for internal organization. This information sets the framework for the subsequent market analysis.

2. Cost structure

After entering the basic data, you can cost structureof your product . This means that you can either select from predefined top categories such as materials, energy, personnel, transport, or packaging. You can also add or customize your own categories. This ensures that the tool can be customized to suit your company's individual needs. Subcategories can also be added and weighted.

For each category, you can specify how much it contributes to the overall product. If necessary, this can be linked to data from the costdata® Market Data Tool, costdata®'s comprehensive benchmark database. This structure allows you to consider the various influencing factors separately and then weight them differently in the analysis .

3. Calculation of the market analysis

Once the cost structure has been defined, market analysis is calculated automatically. The tracker calculates the percentage change in total costs over the selected period and displays the result. The analysis can be saved and exported for later use.

As mentioned above, the calculation is based on an extensive benchmark database that is regularly updated and contains a large amount of different cost data—from raw materials and supplies to wages and overhead costs to logistics and packaging costs.

Where the commodity price tracker is used in practice

The tracker can be used in various areas of the company:

• Purchasing managers check whether price increases by suppliers are in line with market conditions and use the results to support their arguments.

• Commodity managers monitor the development of entire product groups over extended periods of time.

• Product managers analyze why products are no longer achieving the expected profitability.

• Pricing teams use the data to objectively justify price changes to customers.

In any case, the commodity price tracker serves to assess price changes based on objective data rather than relying solely on historical figures, gut feelings, or assumptions.

Example: Analysis of material price trends

Suppose you want to determine whether the material costs for a specific product have risen more sharply in the last 12 months than in overall production. With the tracker, you enter the time period and product name as the basic data. You then create material as the top category and link it to the relevant benchmark values from costdata® Market Data. The analysis then calculates the development of all cost components over this period.

At the end, you can see how much material costs have risen relative to the total price. You can also see whether other influencing factors such as energy or personnel have caused the largest increase. And whether the overall cost development corresponds to relative market movements at all.

This representation makes it possible to objectively question price increases from suppliers or identify internal cost drivers without having to perform additional calculations manually.

Advantages and benefits at a glance

The Commodity Price Tracker provides:

• Cost transparency for individual components of a product

• Transparent price trends for market observation and planning processes

• Argumentation aids for negotiations or pricing decisions

By using benchmark data, the tool creates an objective basis for analyzing your cost structures and supports you in making decisions based on real market developments.

Use the costdata® commodity price tracker as a real game changer in your company.

In summary, the costdata® commodity price tracker is a structured tool for ensuring transparency in your cost development. It provides reliable assistance in analyzing complex cost trends for products and product groups and tracking changes over time. The combination of benchmark data, a clear cost structure, and automatically calculated results enables you to objectively evaluate price developments and make informed decisions.

If you do not wish to perform these analyses yourself, costdata® can take care of using the tracker and evaluating your costs for you as a full-service provider.