Cost Allocation

The invoiced costs of internal service providers are often criticized. Here's what one user of a client who said (quite mistakenly, by the way): "Our SAP system's the most expensive anywhere."

The VMS Fair Pricing module, which can be integrated into the VMS Monitor, makes it a whole lot easier to calculate costs and document individual, day-to-day running costs.

What's important is that the actual price-boosters are actually identified by measuring use. This is because today's method of cost allocation, whether as lump-sum amounts or on a per capita basis, offers little incentive to users to utilize resources economically.

At the same time, suppliers of most cost allocation modules for SAP unfortunately offer no real improvement, either. SAP costs are charged for on the basis of every second of CPU-use per transaction. However, only some seven per cent of these costs fall to the server, which is accessible as a CPU resource-user.

VMS gives you the opportunity of charging for use of SAP systems according to freely-designed utilization criteria. As a starting point, we offer a range of parameters for use such as care-intensive applications components, the costs incurred in application management, license-utilization and, finally, exact charging for technical consumption.

In addition, there is also the matter of developing a control system. Here are some best-practise approaches for some of the more difficult issues in cost allocation:

• pricing in introductory and roll-out phases
• optimizing customized client developments by means of price-management
• extending the IT department's financial leeway where users pay for the operation and the IT department pays for research and development of new IT-assisted processes.

Cost allocation offers many strategic IT opportunities. Come and talk them over with us.