This is a powerful discipline imposed on the company. The main results are:
The establishment of multifunctional teams consisting of marketing people, cost accountants, production managers, quality control professionals and others. These teams are vital to the design and manufacturing decisions required to determine the price and feature combinations that are most likely to appeal to potential buyers of products.
An emphasis on the planning and design stage. This becomes very important to the cost of the product because if something is designed such that it is needlessly expensive to make, it does not matter how efficient the production process is, it will always be a struggle to make satisfactory profits.
Here are some of the decisions, made at the design stage, which can affect the cost of a product:
the features of the product
how to avoid ‘over design’
the number of components needed
whether the components are standard or specialised
the complexity of machining and construction
where the product can be made
what to make in-house and what to sub-contract
the quality of the product
the batch size in which the product can be made
You will see from this list that activity-based costing can also play an important part in target costing. By understanding the cost drivers (cost causers) a company can better control its costs. For example, costs could be driven down by increasing batch size, or reducing the number of components that have to be handled by stores. The concept of value engineering (or value analysis) can be important here. Value engineering aims to reduce costs by identifying those parts of a product or service which do not add value – where ‘value’ is made up of both: