Diamond Attachments has been building durable heavy-equipment attachments for decades. Founded in Atoka, Oklahoma, the family-owned manufacturer produces rippers, sweeps, screens, rakes, cabs, and other equipment solutions designed to stand up to demanding work.
Behind those products are detailed bills of materials containing raw materials, purchased components, labor, and other manufacturing costs. And when the cost of steel and other inputs changes, knowing what it truly costs to manufacture each attachment becomes critical.
Diamond Attachments has relied on Fishbowl for more than a decade to manage inventory, bills of materials, purchasing, and manufacturing data. More recently, Fishbowl worked directly with Craig Cochran to solve another important challenge: giving Diamond a faster and more flexible way to turn changing material costs into accurate, profitable pricing.
The Challenge: Keeping Pricing Aligned with Changing Costs
Accurate costing has been important to Diamond Attachments for a long time. Craig recalled an early lesson that helped push the company toward more disciplined manufacturing and inventory management: after breaking down the bill of materials for one product, the team discovered they were essentially selling it for what it cost them to make. That experience reinforced the importance of understanding every component that goes into a finished product.
As Diamond’s use of Fishbowl matured, Craig built and customized reports to help evaluate costs and pricing. Those reports worked, but the pricing process still depended on a relatively static view of cost. When vendor prices changed, particularly for materials subject to market fluctuations, the team needed a better way to understand the impact across finished goods.
Pricing updates could become a significant project. During the recent review alone, Craig had already spent roughly two months working through products and adjusting prices to get margins where they needed to be.
The challenge wasn’t simply knowing that material prices had changed. Diamond needed to quickly answer a much more important question: based on what our products cost us today, what should we be charging to maintain the profitability we expect?
As Craig explained, “It would help manufacturers be on top of this when costs are rising—to know what they’ve got in it, and to know where they need to go for making profit.”
The Solution: A More Flexible Cost Roll-Up Inside Fishbowl
Fishbowl worked directly with Craig to develop a plugin designed around the way Diamond evaluates manufacturing costs. Instead of relying on a single static calculation, the solution rolls the costs contained within a Fishbowl bill of materials into several useful pricing perspectives:
- Average cost roll-up based on the average cost of the components in the BOM
- Last vendor cost roll-up using the most recent purchasing cost available for applicable components
- Highest-cost roll-up comparing the two and using the higher value as a more conservative basis for pricing
That third option was particularly important to Diamond. If a raw material has recently increased in price, historical average cost may lag behind today’s replacement cost. Looking only at the average could therefore make a finished product appear less expensive to manufacture than it is likely to be going forward. The plugin gives Craig the flexibility to see both perspectives and use the higher cost when appropriate before applying Diamond’s desired profit amount.
“The three options—the average roll-up, the last vendor cost roll-up, and then the highest of the two—those are three good tools,” Craig said.
Fishbowl and Diamond also worked through the details of different item types within the BOM, including inventory, non-inventory, service, and labor items. That collaboration helped bring the new calculation extremely close to Diamond’s existing costing methodology while eliminating much of the manual work behind it.
The Results: Faster Pricing Decisions with Greater Confidence
For Craig, one of the biggest improvements is speed. Instead of working through a static report and manually determining which cost should drive pricing, Diamond can now quickly compare current cost perspectives directly from its Fishbowl data. That provides Diamond with several important advantages:
- More accurate pricing: recent vendor costs can be incorporated into finished-product costing rather than relying solely on historical averages
- Better margin protection: Diamond can use the higher of average or recent vendor cost as the basis for pricing when material costs are increasing
- Greater flexibility: Craig can evaluate costs in multiple ways instead of being locked into one calculation
- Faster analysis: BOM costs can be rolled up and compared without recreating the calculations manually in a report
- More confidence in new-product pricing: because Diamond regularly introduces attachments for new equipment models, existing Fishbowl BOM data provides a reliable starting point for establishing the cost of similar new products
For a manufacturer operating in a market where material prices can move quickly, that visibility helps turn costing data into an actionable pricing decision. Craig summed up the impact simply: “This pricing thing we’re working on right now—this is huge.”
More Than a Decade of Manufacturing with Fishbowl
Diamond’s relationship with Fishbowl goes well beyond its latest pricing project. The company first explored Fishbowl in the mid-2000s before returning to the platform and fully committing to it in 2013. Since then, Fishbowl has become central to how Diamond manages inventory and manufacturing information.
Bills of materials are especially important. Craig works closely with engineering and production to ensure BOMs reflect what is actually required to manufacture each attachment, from major pieces of raw material down to individual bolts, labor, and processing costs. That foundation is what makes accurate cost roll-ups possible. “Fishbowl’s enabled us to keep track of our inventory, and it’s been able to keep track of our bill of materials as well. Those two are huge things.”
Fishbowl’s purchasing history also gives Diamond a record of vendors and the prices paid over time. Combined with accurate BOMs, that information creates the data foundation Diamond needs to understand manufacturing cost and make informed pricing decisions. For Craig, those capabilities have proven their value over the years: “Pricing is really a home run. The bill of materials—a home run.”
Looking Ahead: Turning a Customer Need into a Better Manufacturing Solution
The pricing plugin began with a specific challenge at Diamond Attachments, but Craig immediately saw broader possibilities. Manufacturers everywhere face the same fundamental problem: costs change, sometimes rapidly, while selling prices can remain unchanged unless someone recognizes the impact and takes action.
By bringing BOM data, purchasing history, average cost, and recent vendor cost together, Fishbowl gives manufacturers another way to identify those changes sooner and make better-informed pricing decisions.
For Diamond Attachments, the result is a solution built around the realities of its business, one that replaces a static reporting process with faster analysis, more flexibility, and a clearer view of the margins behind every product. And for Fishbowl, the project is another example of what can happen when customer insight and flexible manufacturing technology come together to solve a real-world problem.
“Being able to grab and know and compare as fast as this works—it’s really incredible.”
