Sourcing · The total cost comparison · Element

The price

The unit price and what it includes.

The part

What it is

Prices are frequently not comparable because they include different things — delivery, packaging, tooling, minimum quantities.

Normalising to a comparable basis is the unglamorous work that makes the rest of the comparison meaningful.

The smallest level

The attributes it carries

Each attribute is one of the framework’s shared types. What a date is, and how it is written, is defined once for the whole model — the note here says what it means in this particular place.