Process Cost Calculation Using Process Data Mining

Abstract

In times of competitive market environments, offering customized products becomes a crucial success factor for manufacturing companies. High variance in the product portfolio leads to expanding costs along the value chain. These costs are not allocated cause-related, which results in cross-subsidization and competitive disadvantage. Process-oriented approaches proved high potential to improve cost allocation. The determination effort often is uneconomically high and results are arbitrarily imprecise. That might result in wrong decisions according the product portfolio and production system. The increasing execution of activities in information systems allows reductions in costs and time as well as increasing quality in process-oriented cost accounting. The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology that uses event data gathered in information systems to determine variant-specific process costs using Process Data Mining.