Bring Accelerating Cost Reductions to Your Company to Develop Common Understanding of how to:

• Lower costs by learning how to identify and reduce waste in your company
• Improve results with new methods for allocating burden and overhead
• Create product cost reductions and improve margins by increasing effectiveness of all workers
• Save money with a new understanding of how to partner with suppliers
• Learn new ways to access working capital to grow your business  
• Identify and reduce the asset drain of work-in-progress
• Positively impact the bottom line by learning how to improve factory utilization with a cost reduction strategy
  

Prerequisites for Accelerating Cost Reductions

• How asset, cash, quality, and customer service management relate to cost management 
• Economic drivers that impact gross margins 
• How cost management can fund your future

Understanding the Real Cost of Your Products

• Eight elements of financial costing
• Three elements of competitive costing 
• Three elements of managerial costing
• Activity based costing systems 

Accelerating Production Cost Reductions

• Improving production effectiveness and cycle time 
• Factory utilization and production line costs 
• Flow production and Just-in-Time (JIT) methods 
• Eliminating non-moving Work-in-Process (WIP)
• Eliminating defects and scrap and rework costs
• Using value-engineering tools to identify and prioritize waste 
• Scheduling to reduce underutilization costs 
• Choosing on-shore or off-shore production sources

• Reducing total material acquisition costs
• Reducing material content and real material cost
• Replacing procurement transaction costs with annualized agreements
• Drivers of supplier’s costs
• Measuring your supplier’s cost reduction curve
• Moving quality’s role to your supplier’s factory
• How to convert your purchasing function to a true supply chain organization

Concurrent Workshops 1 and 2: Reducing production and material acquisition costs

Accelerating Inventory Reduction and Capital Creation

• Why inventory is NOT an asset
• Dramatically reducing inventory...quickly
• Setting safety stock levels, order points, and lot sizes
• Reducing WIP inventory investment
• The relationship of lead-time to inventory investment

Accelerating Product Development Cost Reductions

• Reducing the design cycle and improving time-tomarket
• Determining to create designs internally or externally
• How design costs get into product line P&Ls
• Measuring performance of knowledge workers

Concurrent Workshops 3 and 4: Reducing inventory levels and product development costs

Accelerating Logistics’ Cost Reductions

• Why store inventory
• Identifying cost trade-offs in logistics
• Using time-to-shelf as a competitive weapon
• Price and cost relationships in logistics
• Finished goods inventory, customer service, and shareholder value

Reducing Information Management and Transaction Processing Costs

• Getting your information management system to pay off 
• Information system cost drivers 
• Improving information systems performance and effectiveness 
• Outsourcing opportunities in IS 
• Assuring information integrity

Concurrent Workshops 5 and 6: Reducing logistics and information management costs

Eliminating Non-Value Activities From Administrative Functions

• Relationship of administrative activities to events to where costs ultimately manifest 
• Source of administrative waste 
• Difference between burden and overhead costs 
• Ways to attack obvious and systemic waste

Reducing the TOTAL Cost of People

• How to stop the growth of unnecessary support personnel 
• Identifying systemic waste in support functions 
• Ten ideas for reducing the cost of employees 
• Rethinking metrics in order to shape a ‘variance curious’ culture

Concurrent Workshops 7 and 8: Reducing administrative and people costs

Needed Changes to Cost Accounting Processes  

• Nine ‘litmus test’ questions for cost accountants
• Three requirements of a truly informative cost accounting system
• Accounting for time and waste
• Allocating overhead to individual products properly
• Implementing value-based cost accounting in a manufacturing environment
• Cost accounting systems that change behaviors
• Why net contribution management is more important than gross margin management
• Using new P&L formats and value engineering for real cost reduction

 Mounting an Accelerated Cost Reduction Initiative

• Identifying serious cost drivers in your company
• Distinguishing controllable and control resistant cost drivers 
• The link between cost drivers and shareholder value 
• Cost reduction responsibilities

Designing an Ongoing Cost Reduction Process

• Overcoming technical, organizational, and cultural barriers during implementation
• Designing a successful cost reduction initiative
• Documenting and justifying cost reduction initiatives
• Cost management critical success factors
• Rewarding for significant cost reduction initiatives
• Identifying what participants can do when they return to their companies