4.1. The use of teams in target costing
All of the organizations studied in this research use a team approach in target costing. In the organizations where target costing is relatively formalized and institutionalized, the teams tend to be well established within the organization. With the exception of Telecommunications B and the Consumer Products firms, all of the organizations listed in the ‘‘team member’’ column of Fig. 3 follow an institutionalized approach to target costing, using a hierarchy of teams. For example, the Computer Peripheral firm has a high level program team consisting of marketing/sales, research and development, manufacturing, procurement, process and product engineers, finance, quality, hardware and software engineers and the project manager. During the actual execution, where Computer Peripheral works with the suppliers to achieve the target cost, supply management and procurement engineers are paired and work closely and mutually on achieving the desired target. A similar, tiered-team approach is followed by the remaining ‘‘institutionalized’’ firms. In these teams, supply management generally plays the role of the key supplier interface. The supply management person who sits on the high level or program team has responsibility for overseeing purchasing’s activities in support of target costing. These activities are generally executed by a number of buyers interfacing with a number of suppliers.
Not surprisingly, the team membership of the two telecommunications firms and the Transportation Services firm differs from the manufacturing firms; it does not include engineering or R&D. However, it does include the supplier. Supply management in these organizations work directly and exclusively with the supplier to achieve targets. The non-manufacturing organizations did not have tiered teams, and actually had very limited use of internal teams. This could be because the target costing process was relatively new to the organization in each of these cases, and was driven by supply management, working alone or with other functions.