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Cost Reduction
Cost reduction is the process used by companies to reduce their costs and increase their profits. Depending on a company’s services or products, the strategies can vary. Every decision in the product development process affects cost: design is typically considered to account for 70–80% of the final cost of a project such as an engineering project or the construction of a building. Companies typically launch a new product without focusing too much on cost. Cost becomes more important when competition increases and price becomes a differentiator in the market. The importance of cost reduction in relation to other strategic business goals is often debated. Cost reduction strategies * Supplier consolidation: see examples in the aerospace manufacturing industry * Component consolidation * Low-cost country sourcing * Request for quotations (RFQ) * Supplier cost breakdown analysis * Function cost analysis / Value analysis / Value engineering * Design for manufacture / Design ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cost
In production, research, retail, and accounting, a cost is the value of money that has been used up to produce something or deliver a service, and hence is not available for use anymore. In business, the cost may be one of acquisition, in which case the amount of money expended to acquire it is counted as cost. In this case, money is the input that is gone in order to acquire the thing. This acquisition cost may be the sum of the cost of production as incurred by the original producer, and further costs of transaction as incurred by the acquirer over and above the price paid to the producer. Usually, the price also includes a mark-up for profit over the cost of production. More generalized in the field of economics, cost is a metric that is totaling up as a result of a process or as a differential for the result of a decision. Hence cost is the metric used in the standard modeling paradigm applied to economic processes. Costs (pl.) are often further described based on their t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Value Analysis
Value engineering (VE) is a systematic analysis of the functions of various components and materials to lower the cost of goods, products and services with a tolerable loss of performance or functionality. Value, as defined, is the ratio of function to cost. Value can therefore be manipulated by either improving the function or reducing the cost. It is a primary tenet of value engineering that basic functions be preserved and not be reduced as a consequence of pursuing value improvements. The term "value management" is sometimes used as a synonym of "value engineering", and both promote the planning and delivery of projects with improved performance The reasoning behind value engineering is as follows: if marketers expect a product to become practically or stylistically obsolete within a specific length of time, they can design it to only last for that specific lifetime. The products could be built with higher-grade components, but with value engineering they ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Productivity
Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production process, i.e. output per unit of input, typically over a specific period of time. The most common example is the (aggregate) labour productivity measure, one example of which is GDP per worker. There are many different definitions of productivity (including those that are not defined as ratios of output to input) and the choice among them depends on the purpose of the productivity measurement and/or data availability. The key source of difference between various productivity measures is also usually related (directly or indirectly) to how the outputs and the inputs are aggregated to obtain such a ratio-type measure of productivity. Productivity is a crucial factor in the production performance of firms and nations. Increasing national productivi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Potential Analysis
Potential analysis describes the structural examination of specific characteristics and competencies. Potential analyses provide information about abilities of employees, future events, methods or organizations. Due to that the analysis of the branch of production, the financial sphere, the research & development and the human resources is differentiated. A company might analyze its own potential (productivity, market position) by comparing it to those of the competitors (benchmarking). A market can be analyzed to estimate its potential for a certain product. Processes can be structurally analyzed due to their optimization. Quality criteria of a potential analysis The bases of a qualitative potential analysis are the following quality criteria that need to be fulfilled for any kind of potential analysis. *Validity: should show that the used potential analysis tool is suitable and whether the significance of the examination of future executives is established or not. * Reliability: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Value Added
In business, total value added is calculated by tabulating the unit value added (measured by summing unit profit sale price and production cost">Price.html" ;"title="he difference between Price">sale price and production cost], unit depreciation cost, and unit Direct labor cost, labor cost) per each unit of product sold. Thus, total value added is equivalent to revenue minus intermediate consumption. Value added is a higher portion of revenue for integrated companies (e.g. manufacturing companies) and a lower portion of revenue for less integrated companies (e.g. retail companies); total value added is very closely approximated by compensation of employees, which represents a return to labor, plus earnings before taxes, representative of a return to capital. In economics, specifically macroeconomics, the term value added refers to the contribution of the factors of production (i.e. capital and labor) to raise the value of the product and increase the income of those who own the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Design To Cost
Design-to-Cost (DTC), as part of cost management techniques, describes a systematic approach to controlling the costs of product development and manufacturing. The basic idea is that costs are designed "into the product", even from the earliest concept decisions on and are difficult to remove later. This costs are seen as an equally important parameter besides feature scope and schedule, the three taken together yielding the well-known project triangle. By taking the right design decisions as early as during the initiation and concept phase of the product life-cycle, unnecessary costs at later stages can be avoided. But DTC also tries to capture the necessary measures for cost control during the complete development cycle. In DTC, cost considerations also become part of extended requirements specifications.http://www.cs.odu.edu/~mln/ltrs-pdfs/iaa-ceso-11-90.pdf In contrast to the closely related target costing, DTC does not mean a product will exactly reach a defined cost, rathe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Benchmarking
Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost. Benchmarking is used to measure performance using a specific indicator (cost per unit of measure, productivity per unit of measure, cycle time of x per unit of measure or defects per unit of measure) resulting in a metric of performance that is then compared to others. Also referred to as "best practice benchmarking" or "process benchmarking", this process is used in management in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best-practice companies' processes, usually within a peer group defined for the purposes of comparison. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high-tech, but it is most commonly applied to industrial design, in which raw materials from the primary sector are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other more complex products (such as aircraft, household appliances, furniture, sports equipment or automobiles), or distributed via the tertiary industry to end users and consumers (usually through wholesalers, who in turn sell to retailers, who then sell them to individual customers). Manufacturing engineering is the field of engineering that designs and optimizes the manufacturing process, or the steps through which raw materials are transformed into a final p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Overheads
In business, overhead or overhead expense refers to an ongoing expense of operating a business. Overheads are the expenditure which cannot be conveniently traced to or identified with any particular revenue unit, unlike operating expenses such as raw material and labor. Therefore, overheads cannot be immediately associated with the products or services being offered, thus do not directly generate profits. However, overheads are still vital to business operations as they provide critical support for the business to carry out profit making activities. For example, overhead costs such as the rent for a factory allows workers to manufacture products which can then be sold for a profit. Such expenses are incurred for output generally and not for particular work order; e.g., wages paid to watch and ward staff, heating and lighting expenses of factory, etc. Overheads are also a very important cost element along with direct materials and direct labor. Overheads are often related to accounti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Activity-based Costing
Activity-based costing (ABC) is a costing method that identifies activities in an organization and assigns the cost of each activity to all products and services according to the actual consumption by each. Therefore, this model assigns more indirect costs ( overhead) into direct costs compared to conventional costing. CIMA, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, defines ABC as an approach to the costing and monitoring of activities which involves tracing resource consumption and costing final outputs. Resources are assigned to activities, and activities to cost objects based on consumption estimates. The latter utilize cost drivers to attach activity costs to outputs. The Institute of Cost & Management Accountants of Bangladesh (ICMAB) defines activity-based costing as an accounting method which identifies the activities which a firm performs and then assigns indirect costs to cost objects. Objectives With ABC, a company can soundly estimate the cost elements o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cost Driver
According to the most simple definition, a cost driver is the unit of an activity that causes a change in the activity's cost: A different meaning is assigned to the term by Michael Porter: "cost drivers are the structural determinants of the cost of an activity, reflecting any linkages or interrelationships that affect it". This defines 'cost drivers' not just as a simple ''variable in a function'', but as something that ''changes the function'' itself. For example, the driver 'economy of scale' leads to different costs per unit for different scales of operation (a small cargo vessel is more expensive per unit than a large bulk carrier), and the driver 'capacity utilisation' leads to greater costs per unit if the capacity is uder-utilised and lower costs per unit is the utilisation is high. The Activity Based Costing (ABC) approach relates indirect cost to the activities that drive them to be incurred. Activity Based Costing is based on the belief that activities cause costs and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reverse Costing
Reverse costing describes the process of disassembling (reverse engineering) a device to identify manufacturing technology and calculate its manufacturing costs through a cost analysis In Production (economics), production, research, retail, and accounting, a cost is the value of money that has been used up to produce something or deliver a service, and hence is not available for use anymore. In business, the cost may be one o ... of its parts and the effort required to assemble them. References Costs {{econ-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
