Strategic cost management is the deliberate alignment of a firm’s resources and associated cost structure with long-term strategy and short-term tactics. Although managers continue to pursue efficiency and effectiveness within the firm, increasingly, improvements are obtained across the value chain: through reconfiguring firm boundaries, relocating resources, reengineering processes, and re-evaluating product and service offerings in relation to customer requirements.

In this first paper in a two-part series on strategic cost management in supply chains, Professor Shannon Anderson and co-author Henri C. Dekker from the University Amsterdam review structural cost management.