The leading software platform
to help you find the answers
to the toughest cost and
performance questions
Table of
contents
Meet the professional’s choice
Why choose CostPerform
Software designed by experts
What makes CostPerform a world-class
software platform?
Cost allocation methods
Industry templates
Our markets
Case: TBM at the Small Business Administration
Short success stories
Global Partner Network
Thanks to more than 20 years of
experience, our global partner network
and unique software platform,
CostPerform has become the leader
in cost and performance management
software. Our mission? To empower
people to solve the most complex cost
and performance questions.
When we discovered that none of the products we used could resolve the questions our clients had, we decided to develop our own software. CostPerform was born, and over two decades, it has evolved into what we think is the ultimate expression of our abilities in cost and performance management, both in terms of experience and knowledge. Now, over 450 organizations and 600 consultants spread
across 45 countries use our software, making CostPerform the leader in the field and the professional’s choice foranswering the most complex questions.
Through our world-class software platform and our professional global partner network, we provide the training, coaching and support needed to help organizations get the most out of CostPerform - and their business performance. Read on and discover what CostPerform can do for your organization.
Meet the
professional’s choice
It’s our mission to empower people to solve the most complex cost and performance questions.
The most comprehensive
cost management software
platform
It’s intuitive and easy to use
CostPerform offers multiple cost accounting and allocation methods, various smart calcula-tion funccalcula-tions and several analysis and simu-lation tools. Dashboarding and whiteboarding,
a report generator, ETL (Extract Transfer and Load), and API (Application Program Interface) are also part of the software platform. Thanks to a multitude of possibilities, it can answer any
cost related question.
Working with CostPerform doesn’t require any IT knowledge. And because it’s so intuitive and easy to use, we guarantee that you will be able
to quickly start finding the solutions to your most complex cost and performance issues.
Why choose
CostPerform?
It’s the professional’s
choice
It offers the best value
for money
More than 450 organizations across the globe - ranging from the US Government to large telecom companies - use our software to report to
regulators and to improve their performance. And thanks to our excellent reputation, firms like KPMG,
Deloitte, PWC, Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, and our network of other dedicated partners not only endorse CostPerform but provide support and
consulting services as well.
Compared to similar software platforms, CostPerform’s total cost of ownership is considerably lower, making it the best value for
Complex issues, challenging calculations, and
outdated and unclear cost management software
causes today’s organizations sleepless nights. For
instance: how do you find out what the exact cost
of producing and distributing microchips is? Or
how much it costs to keep an aircraft carrier in a
state of readiness? With ordinary software, you
won’t find the correct answers to those questions,
but with CostPerform’s extraordinary software
platform, you will.
Here’s how. Simply put, the cost structure of most organizations consists of four layers. From top to bottom they are: costs, resources, activities, and products and/or services. CostPerform’s software allows you to visualize those layers and use them as building blocks to represent the current or future cost structure of your organization. When you’ve created the structure, you can assign ‘objects’ (as we call them), to each block. For instance, a hospital has objects such as salaries and depreciation costs, nurses and MRI’s as resources, heart surgery and blood transfusions as activities and by-pass operations
and hip replacements as products. Once the objects are established, the next step is to find the cause-and-effect relationships between the objects and to record and visualize them into a cost model. This model gives you detailed - and thus extremely valuable - insights into the often very complex cost and capacity flows of your organization. With those insights, you can find answers to any cost and performance question, resulting in the knowledge of where to make adjustments to improve business performance.
Current and future insights
But CostPerform doesn’t stop there. Besides being fully customizable to your organizations’ needs, our software is also capable of creating future cost performance scenarios with intelligent simulations, giving you more valuable insights. For instance, when considering whether to introduce a new product or service, you might ask: how will this affect costs, workloads and your profits? CostPerform delivers the answers.
Software designed by
A microchip manufacturer has a $500 million budget to produce 10 million chips. At years-end, bookkeeping signals a budget overrun of 20%: the actual costs were $600 million but they produced 11 million chips. As a CFO, you can just accept this and find someone or something to blame. A more professional approach would be to use CostPerform to do a standard variance analysis. With the help of working standards (batch sizes, time to produce, recipes et cetera), the manufacturer can calculate its allowed
costs (which could even be higher than $600 million) for the 11 million chips produced. And thanks to recorded data on time spent and material used, he can better identify the root cause of the 20% overrun, resulting in (positive and negative) price, volume, occupation and efficiency results. A CFO can use this detailed performance information to improve profit, rather than blaming people for overrunning budget and doing nothing about it.
What makes CostPerform
a world-class software platform?
It serves as your cost
allocation method...
In a transparent way...
CostPerform is designed to serve as your cost allocation method. Thanks to the unique software design with layers, objects, attributes and assignments in combination with smart and proven calculation algorithms, it can handle any cost method. Plus: CostPerform enables you to improve your current and future cost allocation methods. In other words, it grows on you, and
with you.
We’ve ‘rescued’ many of our clients from using spaghetti spreadsheets or - even worse - overpriced,
non-transparent and so-called black box allocation tools. With CostPerform, transparency is guaranteed
thanks to the graphical object navigator, drill-down and roll-up analyser, whiteboarding and the
report generator, making CostPerform ideal for: communication with stakeholders, improving the cost awareness of non-financial colleagues, and convincing
regulators of the compliance of your allocations.
Using state-of-the-art
algorithms…
With affordable impact
Conditional cost distribution, formula based dynamic referencing and multi-dimensional allocation of costs to high transaction volumes are just a few of CostPerform’s many state-of-the-art algorithms, illustrating the intelligence of our software. And thanks to our dedication to
the continuous improvement of our algorithms, CostPerform gets smarter with every release.
If you consider CostPerform as one of your missing business assets - giving you the power to turn rough
data into intelligent and actionable information - it makes your investment absolutely worth it. CostPerform has one of the highest impact-to-cost
ratios in the world, a short payback period and a substantial yearly return on investment. In absolute
terms, clients and partners regard us as highly effective and very affordable, which is exactly why
CostPerform methods &
templates
As mentioned before, one of CostPerform’s
unique features is that it is designed and built
to serve any cost allocation method.
However, this doesn’t mean you have to create your own methods from scratch: CostPerform also comes with predefined methods and templates that are commonly used in your sector or industry. This is not only the easiest way to start your cost management initiatives but also the best way to benefit from our extensive experience in the specific domain.
Common cross-industry cost
allocation methods
Nearly all of our clients use the predefined methods and templates as a base for their own custom methods. Since 2001, we’ve gathered those client-specific methods and organized them in families of costing methods to inspire and provide future customers with the best cost management knowledge. Here are the most commonly used, cross-industry cost allocation methods:
Every organization has activities that can be identified, measured and thus improved for better business performance. Using time-per-activity standards as a cost driver to products is not only an obvious
method but also one that opens up the way to variance analysis and process improvement detection. Making activities more efficient and effective has a direct impact on unit costs and profits.
Capacity Management via CostPerform is all about giving you exclusive insights into the way your company’s capacities (workforce, machines, space, IT et cetera) are being deployed, to answer questions like ‘where’s your unused capacity?’ and ‘where’s your capacity bottleneck in your delivery process?’. The best way to
improve the cost performance of your business is by focusing on all relevant capacities. Not only does a better-managed capacity lower costs directly by constantly removing bottlenecks, it also improves customer experience because of better service, a shorter time to market and faster delivery.
Time-driven Activity-
Based Costing
Multi-dimensional Costing (MDC) is one of today’s most advanced and precise costing methods. This is how it works: by precisely allocating costs to dimensions like ‘Customer’, ‘Country’, ‘Sales channel’, ‘Client group’ and ‘Product’ and then allocating the costs of each dimension to the sales transactions, you end up with a significantly more precise cost allocation and better insights into the true costs and profitability of the combinations of all your dimensions.
For example, everybody can imagine that product X, produced and sold locally is cheaper than the same product sold 10.000 miles away from the factory. But even on your local market a similar trend can be seen: the same product X, sold to a low-volume high-demand client A can be more expensive than when you sell it to reliable, returning client B. This is because your biggest client B always orders in time, never changes the order and has no complaints, meaning that his ‘handling’ costs are lower than the small and difficult clients.
Multi-dimensional
cost & profitability
Multi-dimensional Costing opens up a lot of interesting insights into the true costs and profitability of your company’s outputs and more and gives more precise ‘handles’ to improve performance. Needless to say, if you combine the methods above into one model, you have the ultimate and highest impact cost management model in the world. In our experience, reaching
this level of cost management requires time, the right company culture and mentality and, most importantly, the right data collections. CostPerform won’t stop you from heading this direction in the field of professional cost management: we will follow you closely on your journey to perfection.
CostPerform Industry
templates
Based on our extensive and broad
experience, we not only supply various
methodologies but also provide
industry-specific template models for clients to
increase the effectiveness and efficiency
during implementation and operational
usage of the cost models.
Technology Business Management
(TBM) for IT companies
Most organizations struggle with the way the growing cost of technology (IT) is being managed. With the introduction of TBM, business and technology leaders now have a common model (or language) to jointly manage IT spending for both
processes and increases the cost to serve. Our cost-to-serve template model offers a solid, rich and detailed multidimensional cost model and is perfectly suited to manage the cost-to-serve in a professional and beneficial way.
Other methods and
templates
Please contact us if your required cost allocation method and/or industry is not described here. CostPerform can handle any method and industry, and for most situations we can provide specific example methods and templates that best fit your needs. Just ask! and Utilities template models can
help you cope with the complex demands and transparency needs in an efficient and effective way.
Cost-to-serve for
logistics companies
Every year, consumers buy more goods via the Internet, making logistics companies the most important link in the supply chain. Today, most webshops facing thin margins on their goods can only be profitable if their ‘cost to serve’ is as low as possible. Although ‘same-day delivery’ has a competitive advantage, it also puts high pressure on the logistic
Regulatory reporting
for telecom and utility
companies
Regulators can be very strict and demanding when it comes to cost-allocation reports. Telecom and other utility companies have to comply with these requirements or face very high penalties.
Worldwide
at home
Thanks to more than 20 years of experience and
a vast amount of know-how, CostPerform can
help you improve your performance - regardless
of the field in which you operate. Today we’re
active in the following markets:
Government
Financial Institutions
Government agencies in the US, UK, the Netherlands, all government agencies in Dubai and more than 200 other organizations
worldwide use CostPerform for TBM and cost-price calculations to determine price lists,
ensure funding and for other purposes.
From insurance companies and merchant banks to central banks: CostPerform is used by more
than 25 financial institutions to determine profitability, report to regulators and to
simulate future business models.
Telecom
Manufacturing
and Logistics
Healthcare
IT Services (TBM)
Our clients (40 and counting) in these markets use CostPerform for operational cost and
capacity management, variance analysis, contract management, cost-to-serve
and other purposes.
In the early days of CostPerform, our software platform was in high demand in the hospital
sector. Building on that base we now serve customers throughout every area in the
healthcare sector.
With the increasing popularity of TBM, our number of IT clients (15) is growing fast, both in the private and government sector.
CostPerform is their product of choice to run IT as a business.
Thanks to our ability to handle the extreme complexity of network costing, LRIC (Long Run
Incremental Costs) and other telecom-specific challenges, CostPerform has become the current
market leader in telecom costing. Today, more than 20 telecom companies use CostPerform for
Case: TBM at the Small Business Administration
TBM at the Small Business
Administration (SBA)
The Office of Management and
Budget (OMB) is encouraging
agencies to adopt Technology
Business Management (TBM)
strategies by 2022. While some
agencies are just beginning to
take tentative steps to initiate
TBM projects, the Small Business
Administration (SBA) is a shining
example of one agency further
along in its implementation and
sustainment journey.
The SBA TBM program began two years ago, primarily to address the OMB directive to adopt TBM as the standard taxonomy and reporting structure for Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC). However, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) quickly recognized that TBM implementation also provided important opportunities beyond mere compliance. TBM offered the SBA an ability to enhance the transparency of the
agency’s IT spending, gain visibility into the demand from customers and the cost to serve them, and ultimately optimize the level of enterprise IT spending to support key mission goals and objectives. The SBA selected CostPerform as its TBM solution and utilized an activity-based costing (ABC) approach to provide program offices and support functions the capability to perform cost management, analysis, and reporting. The TBM implementation team benefited from the strong sponsorship of both Maria Roat, SBA’s CIO and program champion, and Tim Gribben, SBA’s former CFO. These executive leaders worked diligently to inform other key SBA stakeholders about the value and benefits of TBM, ensuring this project’s success. Both share the vision of “running IT like a business”;
gaining insights to differentiate what it costs to “run” versus “change” the SBA business. To attain the vision, the TBM implementation team designed and deployed a CostPerform solution that connects plan, budget, and actual data across the TBM taxonomy. But the SBA is not only looking at the past or present, they specifically want to extend the TBM outcomes to the future state of the business. Using forecasting methods to determine expected future performance and cost is a desired and achievable outcome. The flexibility of CostPerform allows the SBA to incorporate mission goals and expand its models beyond TBM baselines.
CostPerform
short success stories
Better
transparency
Save weeks of
IT resources
One of our telecom customers claims they avoided a $1.000.000
fine from the regulator because CostPerform did what it promised: deliver the required
report on time with better transparency than before.
A European bank saves 3 weeks of valuable IT resources every quarter compared to their old (black box) allocation tool, because now the controllers can
run their own cost models with CostPerform in just 2 hours.
First to
report costs
Complete cost
of readiness
Predict upcoming
invoices
A European bank-insurer claimed they are the first to report costs to regulators for
IFRS, GAAP and Solvency, using one cost model only.
CostPerform’s model was their best choice for it.
One of our biggest clients in the US stated that, with CostPerform, it was the first time in history that they could
show the US Congress the complete cost of readiness of
their services.
A logistics company used CostPerform to predict the upcoming invoices from their suppliers and found errors in the invoices, saving large amounts of money that exceeded the cost of
CostPerform Global
Partner Network
Some of our top partners
Through our professional global partner
network, we provide the training,
coaching and support to help you get
the most out of CostPerform and your
business performance.
Our certified partners can help you with the software implementation and provide you with industry-specific knowledge and CostPerform templates to give you a head-start on your cost management initiatives. Furthermore, our
partners also have the experience and skills to realize the most significant performance improvements, discovered with the help of our software platform.
