Strategic Cost Fundamentals

Book excerpt: This book is designed to introduce designers, engineers, technologists, estimators, project managers, and financial analysts as well as students in engineering and business to strategic cost tools for project cost evaluations. The three main sections are as follows. (1) Cost Relationships, Financial Statements, and Performance Measures—This section describes the relationships between cash flows and profits; the relationships between financial statements and the Purcell Diagram; and the issues of cost estimating, time-based breakeven analysis and time-based earned schedule. (2) Tools for Economic Evaluations—This section considers the basic mathematical relations used behind the economic equations and factors; discrete and continuous interest; depreciation terms and methods; and the Present Value of Principal Approach for evaluating loans. (3) Methods for Project Evaluation and Risk Analysis—This section considers payback periods, present worth analysis, return on investment, internal rate of return, benefit/cost ratios and positive-negative project balances; risk techniques of sensitivity analysis, optimistic-pessimistic analysis, discrete probability examples, and continuous probability models using the normal and triangular distributions.