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Cost Modeling Technologies
In several initiatives to help government and commercial enterprises stretch their budgets and control their costs, KBSI has developed a number of innovative methods and technologies for addressing cost management issues. KBSI’s technologies combine structured methodologies with the latest best costing practices.
When determining how to cost different strategy options, decision makers must consider not only the costs incurred today, but also the costs incurred down the road as a consequence of their strategy choice. In other words, effectively weighing different maintenance strategy options requires both cost accounting and cost projection methods and tools. Cost accounting methods assist in appropriately allocating observed costs based on actual resource consumption. Methods like Activity Based Costing (ABC) provide a useful framework for this purpose. Cost projection involves determining the upcoming costs and the timeframe in which they will be incurred. KBSI has developed cost modeling technologies for a number of projects, providing government and commercial industries with solutions to their cost management issues.
In addition to numerous research initiatives, KBSI has developed its own COTS tools to assist customers with their cost management needs. The AIØ WIN® software models business activities and, using automated Activity Based Costing (ABC) modeling and analysis capabilities, traces the costs of those activities. KBSI’s SMARTCOST® helps capture the significant cost elements in a domain and the attributes that drive their costs. Capture rules encode experts’ experience in how costs are realized. SMARTCOST® can also help users visually organize knowledge bases within a product or work breakdown structure and dynamically pivot to view knowledge in different ways, create reusable knowledge modules of select portions of the knowledge base. It can also help assemble composite knowledge bases from these reusable components and generate multi-level cost models supporting estimation summary.
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