• Globalization with customers and suppliers on every continent
  
• Production facilities around the world with very different manufacturing and logistic costs
  
• Overcapacity in regional markets
  
• A commodity market with cost focus

Information Technology issues and challenges pose further complications for the manufacturing industry. For example:

• Mergers and acquisitions have created large companies with diverse IT environments
  
• Various systems are used on the corporate and production facility levels
  
• Process, quality and other production systems are often isolated from the enterprise systems

In order to overcome these challenges and make the right business decisions manufacturing companies must have access to accurate, timely and actionable cost and profitability information. An enterprise cost management approach that integrates cost management and profitability analysis for all levels in the company is the most effective way to ensure that you have this important information.

This is very interesting, but "does it apply to me?" If you answer "YES" to even one of the following questions, an enterprise cost management approach will help your company better manage costs and profitability.

• Do you make cost management and profitability decisions based on insufficient, out-of-date or hard-to-obtain information?
  
• Do you have a legacy costing system that is complicated, difficult to maintain and labor-intensive to manage?
  
• Is costing done in Excel with no common method or business logic?
  
• Does your current costing system run on a legacy mainframe server that is expensive to maintain?
  
• Do the manufacturing facilities perform costing using different methods and systems?
  
• Are you unable to perform cost benchmarking between manufacturing facilities?
  
• Are you unable to clearly understand which products, customers, or manufacturing facilities are profitable and which ones are unprofitable or inefficient?

 Utilizing an enterprise cost management approach can be highly advantageous to your company because, at a minimum, it:

• Provides cost and profitability transparency throughout the organization
  
• Allows the corporation to work as one unit with focus on optimizing profits and reducing costs
  
• Supports continuous cost reduction efforts

Additionally, an enterprise cost management approach solves several IT-related challenges by:

• Allowing for harmonization of cost management methodology and analysis
  
• Supporting integration of diverse accounting, production and process systems for effective business support
  
• Leveraging previous investments in transaction-based systems (ERP and MES) and process historians
  
• Reducing production costs through faster access to reliable information for better and faster decision-making

 Please Contact EPS today for information about how our Cost Management Suite, Transportation Cost Management, Product Cost Management and Real-Time Costing modules can help your company become more profitable through an enterprise cost management approach.