Product data work is the most expensive thing in a distribution business that nobody has ever priced. It sits between departments, it has no owner, and it gets absorbed by whoever has capacity — which is precisely why it never appears as a line anybody signs off.
The arithmetic is not complicated. A complete record for a technical product takes 20 to 40 minutes to build end to end. At 2 000 SKUs a year and 25 minutes each, that is 833 hours — roughly five months of one person's full working time — and about R125 000 at a loaded rate of R150 an hour. Most businesses dispute the rate when they first see it, which is the right instinct, and the honest answer is that R150 is conservative: calculated properly, an administrator on R15 000 a month costs closer to R187 an hour.
Three further costs are real and none of them appears anywhere. Rework, because a proportion of records are wrong first time and finding them costs more than creating them did. Knowledge loss, because the person doing the work accumulates supplier-specific knowledge that exists nowhere else. And opportunity cost — the supplier range you did not take on, because the person who would have loaded it was committed for five months.
The point of calculating this is not to justify buying software. It is to make an invisible cost visible so it can be managed like any other — and below roughly 800 products a year, the honest conclusion is that you should carry on doing it by hand.
Everyone knows onboarding a supplier takes time. Almost nobody has put a number on it. Here is the arithmetic, and the three costs that never appear on a budget.
ReadA R15 000 salary is not R15 000. Once you add the statutory and overhead layers, the hourly rate that matters is usually 40 to 60 percent higher than people assume.
ReadThirty minutes. Bring three supplier URLs and we will capture them live, so you are judging the output rather than the pitch.
