Whitepapers on Product Cost & Enterprise Cost Management

Reduce Product Cost -- Whitepaper

Featured Whitepaper: Reducing Cost of Goods Sold with Enterprise Cost Management

As discrete manufacturing companies experience increasing price pressure from customers, rising supplier costs, overseas competition, and income growth pressure from investors, they are forced to scrutinize product margins and cost of goods sold (COGS) with renewed vigor. Across a variety of market sectors, COGS are typically as high as 70-90% of revenue. The ability to directly reduce COGS presents the opportunity to significantly impact a company’s bottom line. According to a recent industry analyst report1 in which 150 of the top US manufacturing companies were surveyed, “cost estimation and control” were identified as management’s number one concern.

Other available whitepapers for download:

1/2/2008 - Reducing Cost of Goods Sold with Enterprise Cost Management (1.06 MB)
An organization’s financial performance is tied directly to its product costs. The discrete manufacturing and product companies that best understand the true economic costs of their products are the companies that will out-perform their competitors. By capturing how much a product costs earlier in the development process, manufacturers are much better equipped to overcome many of the pressures on their businesses, from meeting customers’ price requirements to achieving overall revenue and profit targets.

3/24/2008 - What Will My Design Cost to Produce? (1.04 MB)
In the never-ending battle for market-leadership, design engineers play a more significant role than they may realize in determining a company’s success. But, it’s not just about which company has the best product; it’s also about which company does a better job of controlling its product costs. Download this whitepaper to learn how real-time product cost assessments are making design engineers heroes in increasing corporate profits.

1/2/2008 - The Anatomy of Product Cost (572.48 KB)
Manufacturing a component requires tangible physical resources -- the material mass, the labor time, time on machines, life of tools, machines, factories, energy, shipping, warehousing costs, and a whole lot more. The fair-market economic cost of these resources, in a truly efficient market, with zero mark-up at any point in the supplier chain is the True Economic Cost of manufacturing the item. This paper will outline what makes up product costs today and why having a better understanding of the True Economic Cost of a product will measurably benefit manufacturing organizations.

1/18/2008 - Creating a Profit-Centric Business Culture (710.25 KB)
Enterprise Cost Management is a new category of enterprise-class software designed to help manufacturing organizations increase profit by driving costs out of their products prior to production (reducing Cost of Goods Sold). With Enterprise Cost Management, companies can significantly improve quality and timeliness of their product cost assessments. Although many companies today lack adequate Enterprise Cost Management capabilities (which determines a firm’s potential to generate more profit), a bigger problem is that firms do not have a corporate-wide focus on increasing overall profit. Without a strong profit ‘culture’ (the will and skill to generate more profit), organizations will fail to reach the potential that Enterprise Cost Management creates. This paper will discuss the foundations for creating a corporate-wide culture of profit.

1/22/2008 - Improving the Quality of Product Cost (676.13 KB)
This whitepaper explores the many facets of what makes a “quality” product cost number, including the different concepts of accuracy, precision, reliability, and understandability. What organizations really need is a product cost number with enough certainty to make the right decisions when the firm has multiple alternatives. aPriori calls this complex idea the Quality of Cost.