Datum

Know what the job actually costs

Costing and operations work for small manufacturers. Two days on your floor, then a job card you can quote from without guessing. Isando, Epping, Pinetown — wherever the machines are.

Book a costing review

Fifteen years on factory floors

Datum is four people working out of a converted unit on Gewel Street in Isando. Our clients turn over somewhere between eight and eighty million rand a year — sheet metal, joinery, food, plastics — the kind of business where the owner is still on the floor at half past five. What we do when we arrive is dull, and it is the whole job. We time the operations with a stopwatch instead of asking what they take. We weigh the offcuts. We pull twelve months of supplier invoices and work out the real landed cost of every input, including the delivery charge you stopped noticing in 2019. We count what is on the racks against what the system says is on the racks. Only then do we say anything. We have never once walked into a factory where the numbers were not already there — they were in a diary, a WhatsApp group, three spreadsheets and one man's head. Our job is to get them into one place and leave them somewhere your office can still use them a year after we have gone.

How a review runs

Two days on your floor, a week of work after it, and one meeting where we hand everything over. No retainer, no lock-in, no software to buy.

Walk the floor

Day one, receiving door to dispatch bay. We follow one real order the whole way through and write down every single place it stands still waiting for something.

Cost the job

Every operation timed, every input priced at what you actually paid this year. Labour, machine hours, consumables, scrap and the delivery bakkie all land on one card.

Find the bottleneck

One machine, one bench or one person is setting the pace of the entire shop. It is almost never the one the floor thinks it is, and it is usually cheap to fix.

Hand it over

You get the costing model as a spreadsheet you own, a one-page quoting sheet for the office, and three months of phone calls while you get used to driving both.

Nobody in this country is losing money because they priced too low on purpose — they are losing it because nobody ever sat down and added up what the job costs.
Werner Kotze, founding partner

Job costing

A costing model built on your own numbers, per product and per operation, that survives a price increase from your steel merchant on a Monday morning. Built in a spreadsheet you can open without us, and we teach whoever quotes to run it.

Production layout

Where the machines stand, where the work waits, and how far a component walks before it is finished. Most shops we see can take a third off their lead time by moving three things and buying nothing at all.

Stock and waste

Reorder levels that match how you actually buy, and a weekly scrap figure the floor can see on the wall. Offcuts, rework and dead stock get a rand value put on them, usually for the first time in the company's life.

Export readiness

Costing for FOB and CIF, HS codes, and what a container really adds to a unit price once you count the wait. We work with your clearing agent rather than around them, and we will say plainly when the margin is not there.

Two days, filmed

A costing review at a sheet-metal shop in Isando, cut down to nine minutes. Swap in your own footage from the editor.

What the owners say afterwards

We were quoting off a price list Datum proved was four years out of date. Three of our best-selling brackets were going out the door under cost. Same size company as last year, and we are keeping about R90 000 a month more.
Ashwin Pillay · Owner, Trident Metal Pressings, Isando
They spent two days on our floor and never once told us how to bake. What they did was put a rand figure on every tray we throw away, which turned out to be the argument I had been losing with my own team for six years.
Ruhaan Adams · Production manager, Buitenkant Bakery, Epping
Datum moved three benches and our lead time went from eleven days to seven. No new machine, no new people. I asked Nomvula what exactly I was paying for and she said, for noticing.
Sizwe Mkhize · Director, Umlazi Plastics, Pinetown

Who comes to site

Werner Kotze
Werner KotzeFounding partner · costing

Twenty-two years costing engineering work, eleven of them inside a pressings group in Germiston before he started doing it for everyone else.

Nomvula Sithole
Nomvula SitholeOperations · layout and flow

Industrial engineer out of Wits who has re-laid more than sixty factory floors and still measures every one of them with a tape rather than a drawing.

Faried Adams
Faried AdamsWestern Cape · stock and waste

Runs the Epping side out of a bakkie, and can tell you what a pallet of almost anything is worth without going to look it up.

Dhiren Naidoo
Dhiren NaidooKwaZulu-Natal · export readiness

Fourteen years in a Durban clearing agency, which is why our export costings have not yet been argued with at the border.

Book the two-day review

R18 500 excluding VAT, anywhere in Gauteng, the Western Cape or KwaZulu-Natal. If the first month does not show you more than that, we do not send the invoice.

Book a review

Tell us what you make

Or phone 011 397 6042 — Gewel Street, Isando. Someone answers between seven and five, and it is usually the person who would do the review.

Production staff only — leave the office out of it.