Costing, activities/services

A praaical way to cost activities/services is to plan out the cost of provision for a particular year group and/or individual pupils. There is a suggested blank format on the CD, Chapter 6 Example 2, for schools to use and adapt where appropriate, of which a sample is set out below. Clearly this exercise is easier for a small primary than a large split-site secondary school. 

According to Hammer and Champy [714], business process reengineering (BPR) is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed. In the BPR literature, rather general definitions of a business process are proposed. Davenport [626], for instance, defines it as a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specified output for a particular customer or market. ... 

Not unexpectedly the industry is hard pressed in times of war to provide adequate supplies for the Services, while in peacetime it is difficult to maintain sufficient effort to keep abreast of world developments and to justify the installation of expensive manufacturing fiicilities. The lowest cost activity is laboratory research and any movement towards chemical engineering development entails a sharp escalation of cost and an extension of the time scale to several years. There is clearly a need to compromise between the higher cost of taking a process to pilot- or full-scale development and the unpreparedness which results from excessive economy. 

This function includes all information about the operational status and maintenance of equipment, vehicles, and facilities. Operational status refers to an availability state (in active service, ready, standby, in/awaiting maintenance, etc.), along with total time in service, time since last regular maintenance, and so on. The ERP system tracks maintenance schedules for the equipment and actual maintenance incidents, both preventive and remedial, and typically an attention list of things that may need inspection and refit. Any maintenance activities include both technical data (nature of fault, repair or change, parts installed, named services performed, etc.) and administrative data (authorization, execution team, date and time, etc.). In addition, this component tracks the schedules, labor, and work assignments of maintenance teams, external maintenance contracts and calls, and actual or assigned costs of maintenance activities. 

Thanks to intense efforts, many potentially harmfnl chemicals are already being ranoved from active service and replaced with new, field-proven and eco-friendly systems that have been tested in accordance with the Oslo and Paris Commission (OSPARCOM) guidelines or their eqnivalents. Use of snch materials offers benefits in terms of health and safety and, ultimately, potential cost reductions when disposal and waste handling charges are factored in. 

Second order reinforcing activities. This type of fit is between activities where one activity supports another. For example, Activity Costing also reinforces another activity, Service-Based Pricing. Activity costs provide the data to set service-related prices. (The term activity in this case is also used in Activity-Based Costing, ABC. This is a separate use of the term from its application in Activity Systems.) Changing the way scheduling is done (Varied... 

Rotch, W., Activity-Based Cost in Service Industries Journal of Cost Management (1990). 

The service provided by maintenance engineering was traditionally that of repairing equipment items when they failed. This is no longer the case, and a maintenance department is now pro-active rather than reactive in its approach. Maintenance of equipment items will be an important consideration in the FDP, because the mode and cost of maintaining equipment plays an important part in the facilities design and in the mode of operation. 

Recreational surfaces must provide certain performance characteristics with acceptable costs, lifetimes, and appearance. Arbitrary but useful distinctions may be made for classification purposes, depending on the principal function a covering intended primarily to provide an attractive surface for private leisure activities, eg, patio surfaces a surface designed for service in a specific sport, eg, track surfaces or a grass-like surface designed for a broad range of heavy-duty recreational activities, including professional athletics, eg, artificial turf for outdoor sports. 

Final Transactional Closure and Reconciliation of Materials and Costs Termination procedures should outline who will have responsibility for assuring residual activities, material shipments, and processing has ceased. It is wise for both parties to confirm that this last step is complete. Normally, residual service activities and material supply ceases once the final invoice has been generated. 

The only statistical techniques which need control are those used to determine the acceptability of a product or service or the capability of a process that produces the product or service. Any activity where you rely on statistical evidence rather than physical measurement is an activity which should be governed by these requirements. The use of recognized techniques is important to the confidence one has in the result. It is similar to the use of measuring equipment that has been calibrated against known standards of accuracy. Unless you actually check every product, measure every attribute or variable you cannot be 100% certain. But that is costly and you can be 99.99% certain by using statistical techniques 99.99% may be sufficiently accurate for your needs. 

The use and cost of HIV service provision in England in 1996 was analyzed by Easterbrock et al. (1998). Standardized activity and case-severity data was collected prospectively in ten English HIV clinics. 5,440 patients attended the services during the first six months of 1996 and 5,708 patients during the second term. Cost estimates per patient-year for HIV service provision in 1996 varied from US 7,324 for asymptomatic patients to US 11,864 for symptomatic non-AIDS patients, and to US 31,758 for patients with AIDS. Easterbrock et al. (1998) concluded that different combinations of antiretroviral therapy affected the cost estimates differently. 

One of the most important phenomena in material science is the reinforcement of mbber by rigid entities, such as carbon black, clays, silicates, calcium carbonate, zinc oxide, MH, and metal oxide [45 7]. Thus, these fillers or reinforcement aids are added to mbber formulations to optimize properties that meet a given service application or sets of performance parameters [48-53]. Although the original purpose is to lower the cost of the molding compounds, prime importance is now attached to the selective active fillers and their quantity that produce specific improvements in mbber physical properties. 

Techniques are needed to record services used by patients, families and others affected by a mental health problem or its treatment. Techniques are also needed to calculate the associated unit costs. These are separate activities. Many instruments have been developed to collect service utilization data. The one that my own research teams employ and which has been widely used elsewhere is the Client Service Receipt Inventory (CSRl ... 

To be useful to those concerned with choices in the allocation of health and social care resources, the data for economic evaluations need to be timely, relevant, credible and accurate (Davies, 1998). As a minimum, the costs associated with the interventions should be estimated from activity data, which quantify resources used, and price or unit cost data. Often evidence from well-controlled prospective trials with high internal validity is required to establish whether differences in economic end points are directly attributable to the interventions. However, the economic evaluations of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors estimated costs from retrospective analysis of available datasets Qonsson et al, 1999b), analysis of published literature (e.g. Stewart et al, 1998) and expert opinion (e.g. O Brien et al, 1999 Neumann et al, 1999). This means that it is not clear whether differences in costs were due to the anticholinesterase inhibitors or to other factors such as availability of services in different areas, the living situation of the patient, or disease severity. 

Monitoring programs must have their own quality assurance programs. These may be called project quality assurance plans or protocols for specific purposes O). If reliable vendors of services are used, the bulk of the quality assurance effort can be placed on those activities unique to the program. Without reliable vendors, QA efforts will be ineffective since it is not cost effective to police quality assurance practices at all lower levels nor to screen all data for its validity. 

Similarly, low volume chemicals are classified according to whether they are sold primarily on the basis of specification or performance. Specialties are generally formulations that are sold on the basis of their performance and their prices reflect their value rather than cost of production. Producers of specialty chemicals often provide extensive technical service to their customers. Examples of specialty chemicals include pharmaceuticals, pesticides, flavours and fragrances, specialty polymers, etc. Fine chemicals, on the other hand, are produced to customer specifications and are often intermediates or active ingredients for specialty chemicals, e.g. pharmaceutical and agrochemical intermediates and bulk actives. 

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