What does one minute cost your business?
We help companies find the profit they are losing — and stay sound as time goes on.
Electricity, maintenance, supervision, warehousing. Costs that belong to no single product and get spread with a coefficient. So the item that sells easily pays for the one that ties up production.
How long each product occupies the machine, the craftsman, the office — times what one minute costs in that particular department. You can check the result yourself, line by line.
A machine that runs four hours a day costs the same as one that runs eight. That gap should not be loaded onto your products. You should see it separately — that is where growth hides without new investment.
Greek businesses
delivered
programmes
What we take on.
Costing
when the data is organised
You know what you sell. You know what you pay. What is missing is the line between the two: which product, which order and which customer actually leaves a profit.
We build your company's cost model with dynamic time equations, at every stage and in every department. Not with averages, and not in spreadsheets, where one wrong formula goes unnoticed for years.
When your data is organised, the model can be ready within a month.
- Where the lost profit is, however complex your production.
- Which customers pay off and which cost more than they bring in.
- Whether a quote is worth taking, before you sign it.
- Which costs add no value and can go.
- How much of your capacity is paid for and left unused.
- Pulled from your ERP. We do not ask you to fill in tables.
- Mapping by department and by stage, with rules that hold up to real complexity.
- Parameterised in minutes. A new product or a change in the production run updates the model on its own.
- Delivered as a live environment that stays inside your business and updates every period.
More than 500 different products across retail, wholesale and multiple production departments, with more than 200 machines in a different combination for each process.
The time equations showed the cost of each product per stage. Changes followed in how the intermediate stages were produced and in distribution.
A workshop with more than 5,000 SKUs. Silver pieces exceeded 70% of sales without paying off. Pricing followed the market, while cost was calculated on volume, with no analysis by stage.
After the analysis the production process changed and profitability reached the intended margins.
Mould changes and pre-heating consumed time that was charged nowhere. Cost was calculated per kilo of raw material, so small and large orders came out the same.
With set-up time and each machine's cycle inside the model, it became clear which orders were being sold below cost.
Pricing per kilo, while cost is driven by fabric type, wash cycle and delivery routes. Two customers with the same kilos cost entirely different amounts.
Capacity analysis separated out the idle time off season, which until then was loaded onto the summer kilos.
With no production line, what remains is time. The journalistic and technical work time per section was recorded and linked to the revenue each one produced.
The same per advertising client: some accounts required disproportionate time relative to the contract.
Clinics and diagnostic centres have a complex service mix, different times per case and multiple reimbursement bodies.
Cost per test and per case comes from the time that staff and equipment are tied up — not from the average of the day.
The function missing from the org chart
Accounting reports the result of the financial year: revenue, expenses, the bottom line. That picture is complete and accurate.
What it does not include — because it falls outside its purpose — is the analysis beneath the total. Which products contribute to the margin and which erode it. Which orders perform against the resources they tie up. Which customers cover the cost of serving them and which are carried by the rest.
We take on that function. We work with the data the business already produces and turn it into measurements a decision can rest on.
The method does not survive in a spreadsheet. That is why Xenophon exists.
Costing done properly takes thousands of calculations that change every time a parameter changes. Xenophon is the environment where your company's rules become equations and run on your own data, with no manual intervention and no approximations.
It is not an off-the-shelf package that you adapt to. It is a tool that adapts to how you work.
Rules, not estimates
Every activity is described with conditions: what changes when the order is larger, the customer new, the packaging special. Complexity goes into the model instead of being ignored.
Full allocation
Every resource enters the model through successive allocations. No cost is left out and none is counted twice — and every result reconciles with the accounts for the period.
Traceability
Every number traces back to the resource and the equation it came from. Nothing comes out of a black box, and every conclusion holds up to scrutiny.
Interactive visualisations
inside your business
Most costing studies end up as a file that gets opened twice and then goes stale. We do not deliver a report.
We deliver a live visualisation environment, built on your own data, where you select a product, customer, department or period and the whole picture follows. Every number opens up and shows where it came from, down to the last line.
You do not wait for the next study. You watch cost change as the business changes — and you test scenarios before the decision, not after.
time utilised
The method is not our own estimate. It is published.
FMCS's application of the method in a Greek manufacturing unit was published in a peer-reviewed international journal. The study describes how the time equations were built across six production departments and the capacity utilisation analysis — the same work carried out on every one of our projects.
The study's conclusion: even in a small plant, the level of analysis the time equations demand goes beyond what a spreadsheet can hold.
The same limit applies to the ERP, for a different reason. It records accurately what happened, but it is not built to run thousands of equations whose conditions change per order, per customer and per stage. That calculation is what Xenophon does — on the data your ERP already holds.
- Authors
- Hümeyra Adıgüzel, Bahçeşehir University · Marios Floros, FMCS Growth Consultants
- Journal
- International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management — Emerald Publishing
- DOI
- 10.1108/IJPPM-11-2018-0397
Business analysis
from published research
Every business has two pictures: the one the balance sheet shows and the one the owner lives. The analysis brings the two together.
We do not deliver a report for the file. We identify what is holding performance back, what threatens liquidity, and which indicators are worth watching daily — and we set up the reports that show them.
- Financial results and the balance sheet
- Cash flows and liquidity pressure points
- Key ratios against the sector
- Long-term viability
- Financial statement forecasting
- A better position with the banks. A documented picture, not just a balance sheet.
- Decisions with scenarios. What happens if energy costs rise, if a major customer is lost, if two people are hired.
- Econometric models for the variables that actually move performance.
- Indicators you monitor, not ones that merely exist.
We examined 675 companies to identify the factors that affect their performance. Leverage has a positive effect — it pushes management to meet targets — as does employee productivity. Size has a negative effect, since the larger a company grows the harder it becomes to control, as does the conflict of interest between shareholders and managers.
The finding that stands out: companies perform best when they finance their operations at a rate of 55.2% to 57.7%.
Investment programmes
our own pre-assessment
A subsidy does not make an investment viable if it does not stand up on its own. We check first whether it stands up.
Every application is preceded by a pre-assessment: we examine whether the plan scores highly and whether it meets every eligibility condition. We do not submit a file that will not pass, and we do not let you lose a submission window waiting.
After approval the hard part begins. That is where money is lost — in wrong procedures, in amendments and in disbursement delays. We stay with you to the end.
- More than 250 investment programmes delivered.
- More than €80 million across the investments delivered.
- 100% approved for the plans that first pass our own pre-assessment.
- Top positions in the national lists of approved investments.
- Manufacturing, supply chain, services, tourism, retail.
- Diagnosis of needs and selection of the programme that fits the investment you want — not the investment that fits the programme.
- Assessment of the investment and bringing out its innovation where it earns points.
- Planning on a five-year horizon, so that no amendments are needed that would delay the grant.
- Monitoring through to disbursement, with no hidden charges along the way.
Business Plans
the first money goes in
When you believe strongly in an idea, the analysis you do starts to look like confirmation. The positive scenario is always examined. The rest, rarely.
We do not give you a sector study of what happened over the past five years. We give you a model for your own case, showing where the break-even point sits, where profitability is maximised, and what happens when the data changes.
It is the cheapest way to find out whether the investment holds — before the investment is made.
- Every scenario over time, not only the one you want to happen.
- How you respond when conditions change — and at what point you have to respond.
- Your business risk and the risks from external factors.
- An exit plan, so you know in advance where you stop.
- What you start with and what your product needs in order to stand apart.
- A stronger position in financing. A documented plan reads differently.
- Early identification of problems that will arise from the way you operate.
- Fewer surprises at the start, legal and operational.
Twenty-one years alongside businesses that produce.
Manufacturing, food, hospitality, food service, technology, logistics, medical services. Businesses with real production and real margins.
Our engagements last for years. Most of these businesses have trusted us with their costs from the first day and still do.
Let us see where your profit is going.
Tell us what you produce. We will tell you what we will look at, and how.
Send us an email