AI Blocks › Handle money and investing
Production cost variance explainer
Give it standard and actual production costs. Get the gap split into price, volume and efficiency causes.
Production cost variance explainer is a free AI skill for the job "Handle money and investing". Give the instructions to an AI assistant that supports the required files and tools, then review its output.
Free · No account · MIT licence · Made by GAJETOso · Thinking: low
Made by GAJETOso. See the original on GitHub; we copied it as it is, with its licence.
What it does
When actual production costs miss the standard, you need to know why. A variance report splits the gap into price, usage, labour rate and labour efficiency, so you can see which part is a purchasing issue and which is a shop floor issue. You give the standard price and quantity per unit and what really happened. The skill runs the material price and usage formulas, then the labour rate and efficiency formulas, and adds fixed overhead spending and volume gaps. It marks each as favourable or unfavourable and asks the root cause questions: bad buying deal or market spike, machine downtime or poor training. The result opens with a total and the main driver.
You give it
- Standard price and quantity per unit
- Actual price paid and quantity used
- Standard and actual labour rate and hours
- Overhead budget and actual spend (optional)
You get
- Total variance, favourable or unfavourable
- Material and labour variances broken out
- Overhead variance
- The primary driver in one line
- Suggested root causes to check
Use it when
- Month end shows production cost above budget and nobody can say why.
- You need to tell your boss whether the overrun came from suppliers or from the floor.
- You are checking whether a favourable material price hid a worse usage problem.
- You are preparing a production audit and need numbers behind each gap.
How to use it
- Add it to your AI once: download it and add the folder to Claude, ChatGPT or Codex as a skill.
- Ask for the job in your own words. Your AI opens the skill when it fits.