Estágio realizado na Sonae MC, e orientado pela Dr. Ana Cristina Leandro / Tese de Mestrado Integrado. Engenharia Industrial e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2012

The purpose of this research was to understand cost containment strategies used by private hospitals under managed care plans and their relationship to quality of care within the South African environment. The data was collected using a questionnaire consisting of closed questions requesting respondents to rate statements about costs and quality of care, as well as open questions for additional information about costs and quality of care. The study found that managed care has the ability to control costs and that hospitals monitor LOS and prescribe generic medication in order to control costs. The study also found that cost control strategies have a negative impact on quality of care and that hospitals place more emphasis on cost control than quality of care. In addition, large hospitals that enjoy high occupancy rates experienced an increase in patient complaints since the introduction of managed care, compared to small and medium hospitals. The study found that managed care has had a better than average impact on controlling costs and a better than average impact in quality reduction, however the correlation between cost control and quality reduction was negative. Finally, the study found that technology has an impact on rising healthcare costs and that any constraints placed on rising costs associated with technology will have a negative impact on quality of care. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Em um momento da gestão eficaz, de exigência de alta produtividade, qualidade, inovação e de pressões ambientais e sociais, talvez um dos fatores mais determinantes do sucesso ou fracasso da empresa seja o posicionamento da mesma quanto aos seus custos. A contabilidade de custos, após um longo período de estagnação e, por conseqüência, perda da relevância, teve de adequar-se à nova realidade, evoluindo dos sistemas tradicionais de custeio, focados na mensuração e controle, para sistemas que focassem a gestão ao invés do controle, nascendo, dessa forma, o custeio baseado em atividades. Os diferenciais quanto a esse método de custeio em relação aos chamados métodos tradicionais residem em dois importantes conceitos embutidos na sua concepção: o conceito de atividades e, principalmente, o conceito de direcionadores de custo ou cost drivers. A precisão, o custo de coleta e manutenção dos dados e também a influência dos cost drivers sobre os gestores devem ser analisadas para a seleção dos direcionadores de custos. Dada a importância do custeio baseado em atividades e, por conseqüência, da escolha de direcionadores de custos, o trabalho busca desenvolver procedimentos para seleção de direcionadores que possam ser originados de dados já existentes na empresa e de fácil manuseio e gestão, os chamados direcionadores de transação, analisando a adequação desses direcionadores quanto a seu custo de obtenção, efeito comportamental e precisão. / In a moment of the effective administration, of demand of high productivity, quality, innovation and of environmental and social pressures, perhaps one of the factors more determinant of the success or failure of the company is the positioning of the same with relationship at your costs. The cost accounting, after a long stagnation period and, for consequence, loss of the relevance, had to adapt to the new reality, developing of the traditional systems of costing, centered in the measure and control, for systems that centered the administration instead of the control, being born, in that way, the activity based costing. You differentiate yourselves with relationship to that costing method in relation to the calls traditional methods they reside in two important concepts embedded in your conception: the concept of activities and, mainly, the concept of cost drivers. The precision, the collection cost and maintenance of the data and also the influence of the cost drivers on the managers should be analyzed for the selection of the cost drivers. Given the importance of the activity based costing and, for consequence, of the choice of costs drivers, the work search to develop procedures for selection of cost drivers that can be originated of already data existent in the company and of easy handling and administration, the calls transaction cost drivers, analyzing the adaptation of those cost drivers with relationship your obtaining cost, effect in the behavior and precision.

A Study of Student Unit Costs for Public Senior Secondary Education in Taiwan Hsiu-Wen Tseng Abstract This research adopts the methodology of literature analysis, documentary one and empirical regression one to explore the current student unit costs of public senior secondary schools and the relevant issues. The purposes of this study are (a) to analyze the developmental trend and the current status of educational expenditures allocation for education at all levels, (b) to explore the cost drivers of student costs for public senior secondary schools through regression analysis and construct a calculating model for student unit costs, and (c) to offer relevant institutes some specific suggestions as improvements for the allocation system of educational funds according to this model so as to develop the maximum function of public education funds. The main conclusions are obtained as follows: 1. In the recent ten years, there is a great fluctuation in the structure of education at all levels in our country and the educational expenditures have increased a great deal yearly. 2. The context of student unit costs should be composed of current expenditures and capital ones. The former are the basic resource of funds for maintaining the normal operation of school-affairs, so these could be referred as the equivalent of the basic needs for every school; the latter are the expenditures for facilities and construction. The expenditures for facilities are mainly the expenses for teaching which are directly beneficial to the quality of learning. 3. Through descriptive statistics, we find that the expenditures of construction constitute the majority of capital expenditures in public senior secondary education, so the ratio for the expenditures of facilities is relatively low. 4. The current expenditures of public senior secondary schools have great regularity, so they could be predict the amount by the best regression model composed of three main cost drivers, which are the amounts of teachers, classes and staffs. According to the results of our research above, we propose the following suggestions: 1. The current expenditures and capital ones should be allocated by different methods because of their different cost behaviors. 2. The current expenditures have great regularity, so this kind of expenditures could be calculated and allocated by a funding formula through general educational grants. 3. The capital expenditures have no certain regularity, so this kind of expenditures is not suitable to be predicted from a normal viewpoint. This should be separated from general educational grants and continuously allocated by the method of plan grants. Besides, the central government should formulate the specific standards for the facilities and construction of education at all levels as the references of examining the proposals for capital grants. 4. The central government should establish a data base of the fundamental teaching equipment and educational expenditures of education at all levels for educational administrative institutes, schools and outsiders to examine, supervise and proceed relevant researches. 5. The central government should revise the accounting system of public educational institutes and establish a independent accounting system for public schools in order to fulfill School based management and develop the concept of accountability and ability to establish the features of schools for school authorities.

Em um momento da gestão eficaz, de exigência de alta produtividade, qualidade, inovação e de pressões ambientais e sociais, talvez um dos fatores mais determinantes do sucesso ou fracasso da empresa seja o posicionamento da mesma quanto aos seus custos. A contabilidade de custos, após um longo período de estagnação e, por conseqüência, perda da relevância, teve de adequar-se à nova realidade, evoluindo dos sistemas tradicionais de custeio, focados na mensuração e controle, para sistemas que focassem a gestão ao invés do controle, nascendo, dessa forma, o custeio baseado em atividades. Os diferenciais quanto a esse método de custeio em relação aos chamados métodos tradicionais residem em dois importantes conceitos embutidos na sua concepção: o conceito de atividades e, principalmente, o conceito de direcionadores de custo ou cost drivers. A precisão, o custo de coleta e manutenção dos dados e também a influência dos cost drivers sobre os gestores devem ser analisadas para a seleção dos direcionadores de custos. Dada a importância do custeio baseado em atividades e, por conseqüência, da escolha de direcionadores de custos, o trabalho busca desenvolver procedimentos para seleção de direcionadores que possam ser originados de dados já existentes na empresa e de fácil manuseio e gestão, os chamados direcionadores de transação, analisando a adequação desses direcionadores quanto a seu custo de obtenção, efeito comportamental e precisão. / In a moment of the effective administration, of demand of high productivity, quality, innovation and of environmental and social pressures, perhaps one of the factors more determinant of the success or failure of the company is the positioning of the same with relationship at your costs. The cost accounting, after a long stagnation period and, for consequence, loss of the relevance, had to adapt to the new reality, developing of the traditional systems of costing, centered in the measure and control, for systems that centered the administration instead of the control, being born, in that way, the activity based costing. You differentiate yourselves with relationship to that costing method in relation to the calls traditional methods they reside in two important concepts embedded in your conception: the concept of activities and, mainly, the concept of cost drivers. The precision, the collection cost and maintenance of the data and also the influence of the cost drivers on the managers should be analyzed for the selection of the cost drivers. Given the importance of the activity based costing and, for consequence, of the choice of costs drivers, the work search to develop procedures for selection of cost drivers that can be originated of already data existent in the company and of easy handling and administration, the calls transaction cost drivers, analyzing the adaptation of those cost drivers with relationship your obtaining cost, effect in the behavior and precision.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T15:49:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Em mercados competitivos como, por exemplo, o de celulares, empresas de software que liberam produtos com baixa qualidade podem rapidamente perder os seus clientes. A fim de evitar esse problema, essas empresas devem garantir que a qualidade dos produtos atenda a expectativa de seus clientes. Nesse contexto, testes é uma das atividades mais utilizadas para se tentar melhorar a qualidade de um software. Além disso, o resultado da atividade de teste está sendo considerado tão importante que em muitos casos é preferível alocar equipes exclusivamente para exercer atividades de teste. Essas equipes de teste devem ser capazes de estimar o esforço exigido para exercer as suas atividades dentro do prazo ou para solicitar mais recursos ou negociar prazos quando necessário. Na prática, as consequências de se ter estimativas ruins são onerosas para a organização: redução de escopo, atraso nas entregas ou horas extras de trabalho. O impacto dessas consequências é ainda maior em se tratando de execução manual de testes. Visando uma melhor forma de estimar esforço de execução manual de casos de teste funcionais, esta pesquisa propõe e valida uma medida de tamanho de teste e de complexidade de execução baseada nas próprias especificações dos testes, bem como um método de medição para a métrica proposta. Além disso, diversos estudos de caso, survey e experimentos foram realizados para avaliar o impacto desse trabalho. Durante esses estudos, verificamos uma melhoria significativa proporcionada por nossa abordagem na precisão das estimativas de esforço de execução de testes manuais. Também identificamos fatores de custo relacionados a atividades de execução manual de testes utilizando julgamento de especialistas. O efeito desses fatores foram investigados através da execução de experimentos controlados, onde pudemos constatar que apenas alguns dos fatores identificados tiveram efeito significativo. Por fim, diversas ferramentas de suporte foram desenvolvidas durante essa pesquisa, incluindo a automação das estimativas de esforço de execução de testes a partir de especificações de testes escritas em linguagem natural

Introduction: Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region worst affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the world. South Africa (SA) is the country with the highest population of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world and Mpumalanga province is the province with the second highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in SA. The district of Gert Sibande has the highest prevalence in the province of Mpumalanga (38.9%) in 2006. Since many patients living with HIV/AIDS usually present to district hospitals as the first point of contact it is important to understand the implications of HIV/AIDS in a resource limited health system. Study setting: The setting for this study was Amajuba Memorial Hospital (AMH) a district hospital in the Gert Sibande district of the Mpumalanga province. Objective: To analyse direct costs of providing inpatient care to adult patients with HIV/AIDS-related illnesses at AMH from the perspective of the provider (hospital) Study methods: The population of study comprised adult patients with HIV/AIDS-related illnesses admitted to the medical wards during the period of October 2009 and March 2010 at AMH. A detailed retrospective record review of patients admitted to the adult wards at AMH with HIV/AIDS-related illnesses over a 6-month period was conducted. After the record review the costs were estimated using standard costs and utilisation. Demographic and clinical patient profiles were determined then descriptive statistics were calculated with total costs as an outcome variable. Subsequently univariate and multivariate regression analysis were performed. Results: The demographic and clinical profiles revealed that most patients admitted with HIV/AIDS-related illnesses were: between the ages of 39 & 49 years (35.3%), male (54.9%), urban residents (82.0%), unemployed (87.2%), single (80.5%), were not on HAART (70.7%), had CD4 counts between 0 & 50 x 106 /L (38.3%), had pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) (38.4%), were admitted for the first time (60.9%) and of the total admitted to hospital 79.0% survived the index admission during the study period. Descriptive statistics of the continuous data variables were determined. Minimums, maximums, inter-quartile ratios, means and modes were determined and tabulated. 5 Consultation costs followed by investigation costs were the two major contributors to total admission costs (77.7% of the median total admission cost). Univariate analysis revealed these significant associations with total admission costs: admission diagnosis, discharge diagnosis, first admission, outcome, pre-admission consults and preceding admissions. In multivariate regression, admission diagnosis and pre-admission consults were analysed. Significant associations were found between the following categories: retroviral disease versus other diseases (p=0.001), retroviral disease versus anaemia (p=0.035), no pre-admission consults versus 1 pre-admission consult (p=0.007), no pre-admission consult versus 4 pre-admission consults (p=0.039) and no pre-admission consult versus 5 or more pre-admission consults (p=0.006). Conclusion: In our study we successfully determined demographic and clinical profiles of patients admitted with HIV-related illnesses at AMH. Emerging from the results of our study were patterns of burden of HIV disease, health seeking behaviour and risky sexual behaviour that all had implications for admission costs in the hospital. Major cost drivers were consultation and investigation costs, which were increased significantly by disease categories; other diseases, anaemia and PTB. Pre-admission consults emerged as a cost reducing parameter in our study. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Clinical Epidemiology / unrestricted

One of the dilemmas that information systems (IS) decision-makers encounter is the identification of the often hidden costs associated with IS adoption, particularly since most of them are reported to be external to the traditional IS budget. The review of the IS literature has identified that much effort to date has focused on the identification and measurement of direct costs, and that much less attention has been paid to indirect costs. One of the main problems reported in the literature associated with looking at indirect costs is that they are intangible and difficult to quantify, and there is evidence suggesting that these indirect costs are rarely completely budgeted for, and thus deserve a much closer consideration by decision-makers. This research investigates this view, arguing that one element of indirect costs, that is, indirect human costs (lRCs), is underestimated and little understood. The author argues that it is not possible to estimate or evaluate IHCs without first identifying all their components, yet there is an absence of models that show how such costs are allocated for IS adoption. This underpins the necessity of the present research. Proposed here is a framework of nine sequential phases for accommodating indirect human costs. In addition to this, 1) three conjectures, 2) cost taxonomy and 3) an interrelationship-mapping cost driver model of IRCs, are proposed based on the literature analysis and underpinning the conceptual phases of the framework. To test the conjectures and validate the models proposed, a case research strategy using case settings were carried out in the private sector. Empirical findings validates the models proposed and reveal that indirect human costs are perceived as costs associated with IS adoption, nevertheless not included in the evaluation process or investment proposals. However, during the empirical research, new cost factors and drivers emerged, which resulted in modifications being made to the previously proposed conceptual models. In doing so, it provides investment decision-makers with novel frames of reference and an extensive list of IRCs that can be used during both the IS budget proposals and the evaluation process of the IS investment.

Diploma thesis aims at cost drivers, cost classification and cost allocation. These issues are described with respect to traditional and modern approach and their comparison. In the thesis selected methods of cost estimation and modern methods of cost management are introduced as well. Following the theoretical part, application part focuses on cost analysis in particular company in order to find out cost drivers, to follow-up of cost management system and to give some suggestions, how to improve this area. The application part is not published because of content of restricted data.

Engineering-to-order is a production approach that aims to develop each customer order from scratch based on specific requirements, and is therefore inevitably characterised by a high product variety. It is clear that this strategy is costly, but previous research is lacking in terms of providing real-life data regarding how a high product variety affects costs. Therefore, this thesis aims to analyse the cost-variety relationship through a single-case study consisting of observations, interviews as well as calculations, with respect to the value-creating process of a Swedish engineering-to-order business. The results reveal that while the cost of variety may not be influenced at the product level, it can be influenced at the component level. Furthermore, the three aspects that drives component variety cost the most are the number of new components in a product, the number of different components at the company as a whole, as well as the number of different suppliers. Of these, the most influential aspect is the time spent working with new components, which consumes roughly 10% of the total working time throughout the value-creating process. Moreover, the effects of these aspects differ across different parts of the process as well as component types. The results show that the largest costs are driven upstream in the value-creating process and for advanced components. It is however difficult to decrease the variety of advanced components as a rather high variety is required to meet customer needs. Instead, less advanced components offer more easily obtained savings. Finally, the thesis also suggests three ways to mitigate the negative effects of high product variety. Firstly, improving the accessibility and spread of information to ensure internal alignment in the management and maintenance of components. Secondly, identifying common synergies across different projects and products to create economies of scale. And thirdly, explore to what extent processes and components can be standardised.