Widening of Perimeters in New Models

All the preceding sections are concerned with the usual subjects of costing, that is to say, the routine costing of products, services, clients, product families and strategic business units. Although integrating through depreciations or provisions some factors related to longer periods, these cost calculations come under short-term local management. These costs are increasingly insufficient, which makes it necessary to widen the temporal horizon so as to cover the production life cycle and, if possible, the overall life cycle of products before preparing to launch them, as well as to involve external partners in these estimations. Thus a management controller is confronted with a twofold widening of the perimeter: one spatial, the other temporal. Temporal widening is not new: it can be traced back to the development of variance analyses that result from a comparison of two situations of a given model over a period of time. However, in that case it is a mere duplication. Currently, a widening of the temporal horizon is associated with the development of techniques of middle-term projected costs, whether they are called target costs or design to costs. The widening of the spatial horizon is to be connected with the multiplication of outsourcing leading to more or less durable partnerships. The two movements currently go hand in hand with the approach to overall life-cycle costs, insofar as it becomes less and less likely that enterprises develop innovation by themselves. This leads the spatial horizon to integrate into its estimations relationships with its partners.