The Price List Just Changed

The Company

Ostmark Timber sells and distributes structural timber, engineered wood products, and sheet materials to construction firms, joinery workshops, and building merchants across Styria and into Slovenia and Hungary. They stock somewhere north of 400 active SKUs, run their own small lorry fleet out of Graz, and turn over a reasonable volume on margins that leave almost no room for error. The business isn't struggling, but it doesn't have fat to burn either.

The Pain

Markus runs purchasing. A few times a month, sometimes more, a supplier sends a revised price list as a PDF. It's usually a table, sometimes a dense one, with their own product codes that don't match Ostmark's internal codes, and no indication of what's changed since the last version. Markus has to open the PDF, work out what's moved, cross-reference it against what they've currently got on order, and figure out whether any of those orders are now going to ship at a loss. He's doing this manually, in spreadsheets, while also fielding calls and doing everything else. He doesn't always get to it the same day. Sometimes an order ships before he's had the chance to check. The margin issue only surfaces later, if it surfaces at all.

The Move

When a price update arrives, Markus pulls the text out of the PDF — copy-paste, or a free tool like Adobe's online extractor if it's a scanned document — and runs a plain-text export of his open orders from the ERP. He pastes both into Claude with a standing prompt he's already written and saved. Something like: "Here's a supplier price list and a list of our open orders. Match them where you can. Tell me which orders are now priced below the new cost, by how much, and which ones are due to ship soon enough that I need to talk to the customer first."

Claude returns a short list. Matched lines, gaps flagged, the worst-affected orders at the top. Markus doesn't have to treat it as final — the matching won't be perfect every time, especially where codes don't line up cleanly — but it tells him where to look. He spends twenty minutes checking the ones flagged as problems instead of two hours checking everything. No margin-negative order ships without him at least knowing about it.

The blind spot

The PDF feels like the hard part, so people assume this needs a proper integration — something that reads supplier files automatically and talks to the ERP. That's a real thing, and it exists, but it's a project. This isn't. It's a prompt Markus writes once and keeps in a text file.

The pattern

The same approach works in a few other situations:

• A haulage company's operations manager pastes a fuel surcharge update alongside a list of active customer contracts to see which ones are now priced too low to cover costs.
• A food distributor's buyer gets a harvest shortfall notice and wants to know quickly which standing orders are affected before they ring customers.
• A print shop receives a paper stock price change and wants to check it against quotes that have already gone out but not yet been invoiced.