By Sagar Shankaran, Founder of CallSphere
A resin increase means re-costing hundreds of part numbers one at a time. Splitting the list four ways by contract rule moves the pass-through weeks earlier.
Key takeaways
Nine cents a pound, effective September 1, thirty days' notice, 340 active part numbers.
The letter came from your polypropylene supplier on a Friday afternoon in July, which is when those letters always come. Your controller printed it, walked it to the sales manager, and the two of them agreed to "get on it next week." It is now the second week of August, roughly 40 of the 340 part numbers have been re-costed, and every part you ship in September at the old price is money you will not get back.
It is not laziness and it is not a staffing problem. It is that the job is genuinely serial and each part number is genuinely different.
To re-cost one part you need the shot weight including runner, the actual regrind percentage you run on it, whether the resin is yours or customer-supplied, the resin grade and whether this specific grade is covered by the increase, the contract terms on that account, and how much notice that contract requires. Then you have to know whether that account is on a firm annual price, a quarterly resin index, a blanket purchase order with no adjustment clause at all, or a handshake with a buyer who left in April.
A good cost accountant does maybe fifteen an hour on the easy accounts and three an hour on the ugly ones. Across 340 parts spread over 60 customers with four different contract shapes, that is two to three weeks of somebody's undivided attention, and nobody in a molding shop has two undivided weeks in August — that is when the lawn and garden tooling reviews land and the automotive shutdown week scrambles everyone's schedule.
Agent Teams shipped as a research preview alongside Claude Opus 4.6, and multi-agent working became a normal way to run a large job: several agents split one big pile of work, run at the same time, and their results get merged at the end. There is nothing clever about that idea. What is new is that it is available to a business without a software department.
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For a molder, parallel agents mean a 340-part re-costing job stops being one person working down a list in order and becomes four workers going at four slices of the list at once, with the results merged into a single sheet the controller reviews.
The work each one does is the same boring work your cost accountant does: pull the shot weight and runner weight, apply the regrind, multiply by the increase, apply the account's contract rule, flag the exceptions. It is the calendar that changes.
flowchart TD
A["Supplier letter: PP up 9 cents a pound, effective September 1"] --> B["Split 340 active part numbers four ways"]
B --> C["Slice 1: firm annual price accounts with notice clauses"]
B --> D["Slice 2: quarterly resin index accounts"]
B --> E["Slice 3: blanket PO and spot accounts"]
B --> F["Slice 4: regrind-heavy and customer-supplied resin parts"]
C --> G["Merged sheet, one row per part number, exceptions flagged"]
D --> G
E --> G
F --> G
G --> H["Controller and sales manager sign the customer letters"]
Do not split it alphabetically or by press. Split it by the rule that governs the answer, because that is what keeps the merged sheet consistent.
Each slice runs at the same time. Each one produces the same row format: part number, customer, shot weight with runner, regrind percentage, resin grade, pounds per thousand pieces, old price, new price, dollar change per thousand, contract rule applied, notice date required, and a flag if anything did not add up.
The letter arrives Friday. Monday morning your controller exports the active part list out of the ERP with shot weights and current pricing, drops in the resin letter and the contract terms folder, and defines the four slices. The work runs through Monday. Tuesday morning she has a merged sheet with 340 rows and 31 flagged exceptions — mostly parts where the shot weight in the system does not match what the press actually runs, which is its own useful discovery.
Tuesday and Wednesday she and the sales manager work the exceptions and decide the commercial posture account by account. Thursday the letters go out, dated well inside the notice windows. The whole thing lands about two and a half weeks earlier than it did last year, which is the entire point.
Assume you buy 3.1 million pounds of polypropylene a year, and roughly 62% of it is on accounts where you can pass through an increase with proper notice. Assume the increase is $0.09 per pound and that finishing the re-costing sooner moves the effective date of your pass-through forward by 17 days.
| Annual PP volume | 3,100,000 lb |
| Share on pass-through-eligible accounts | 62%, or 1,922,000 lb |
| Pounds per day, 250 working days | 7,688 lb |
| Increase per pound | $0.09 |
| Exposure per day not passed through | $692 |
| Days recovered by finishing earlier | 17 |
| Margin recovered, this one increase | $11,764 |
| If resin letters come three times a year | Roughly $35,000 |
Two caveats worth saying out loud. Some of those days were never recoverable because the contract notice period fixes the date regardless of when you finish — that is a real reduction to the number. And the exception list is where the bigger money often is: shops that run this find shot weights in the system that have been wrong since the tool was re-cut, which means parts that have been mispriced for years.
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Splitting the arithmetic is safe. Splitting the relationship is not.
The letter to the buyer at your largest account should be written by a person who knows that they took a price hold last year and that their program manager is under pressure on their own cost targets. Sending 60 identical letters in one batch is the fastest way to turn a routine pass-through into six escalations and a sourcing review.
Contract interpretation stays human too. "Material adjustment upon documented supplier increase" sounds clear until you have to decide whether a specialty grade with a different index counts, or whether the increase letter itself is documentation enough. That is a question for whoever signs your contracts, and getting it wrong in writing is worse than being late.
Finally, check the resin grade mapping by hand on the first pass. Shops carry the same resin under three descriptions in the system — the supplier grade, an internal code, and whatever a scheduler typed in 2019. If the split is done on the bad field, all four slices are wrong in the same direction, and a merged sheet full of confident wrong numbers is more dangerous than an unfinished one.
No, it makes it more valuable, because the exception list is exactly where the bad shot weights surface. Expect the first run to be half re-costing and half data cleanup. Have a process tech verify the flagged parts against the actual part-plus-runner weight at the press.
A formula handles the multiplication, which was never the slow part. The slow part is reading 60 different contracts, deciding which rule applies to each account, checking whether the specific resin grade is covered, and handling regrind and customer-supplied material differently. That is judgment applied 340 times, and that is what gets split up.
Same job, opposite direction, and most shops are much slower at it — which is a customer relationship problem more than a margin one. Buyers on index accounts track resin prices and they notice. Running the decrease with the same speed you ran the increase buys you enormous credibility the next time you send an increase letter.
It is a good fit for the parts of a PPAP submission that are assembly rather than judgment — pulling material certificates, formatting dimensional results, assembling the control plan and the flow diagram across a family of twelve part numbers. The Part Submission Warrant and the capability study conclusions stay with your quality manager.
Sixty pass-through letters generate a week of inbound calls, and they arrive while your controller and sales manager are on the phone with the accounts that matter most. CallSphere builds AI voice and chat agents that answer the line, take the caller's account and part numbers, answer the routine "when does this take effect" questions from what you tell it, and book the callback with the right person. It does not negotiate your prices — that call still belongs to your sales manager.
Written by
Sagar Shankaran· Founder, CallSphere
LinkedInSagar Shankaran is the founder of CallSphere, where he builds production AI voice and chat agents deployed across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, and home services. He writes about agentic AI, LLM engineering, and shipping voice agents that handle real calls in production.
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