Reference and Simulation Costing 

Purpose

Reference and Simulation Costing is a tool for planning costs and setting prices, with which you manually enter the costing items in spreadsheet form in a unit cost estimate.

With this component, you can create base planning objects. A base planning object is a reference object of Product Cost Planning which you create in Reference and Simulation Costing, in order to plan costs for a new product or service and simulate changes to existing cost estimates.

Integration

In base object costing, you can access data in the Controlling, Materials Management and Production Planning modules.

You can access data that already exists in the R/3 System, such as:

For further information ,see Master Data for Unit Costing.

Features

You create base planning objects to plan new products or services. They provide the data required for management decisions as to the manufacture of products, the provision of services, or whether the product should be produced internally or externally.

You enter the additive costs manually in the form of a unit cost estimate.

You can use the base planning object as follows:

You can use a base planning object in the costing of the following objects in the R/3 System:

As a Spreadsheet Without Accessing Data in the R/3 System

In the first stage of a feasibility study, you create a cost estimate. In this cost estimate, you create an item consisting of a quantity, a unit of measure, and a price, for each operation to be carried out. The sum of the item values is the total costs of the undertaking.

At a later stage, you can expand this costing template with detailed information from the R/3 System on the materials to be used and activities to be provided.

Spreadsheet with Access to Data in the R/3 System

In a base object cost estimate, you list all the materials and activity types required to carry out a specific process. The R/3 System valuates them using prices from the material master records, and the activity prices from Cost Center Accounting. The total costs of the process are produced from the total of the costing items.

You can use this cost estimate later as a reference when carrying out cost planning for an order or a project.

Item in Another Cost Estimate

You create three base object cost estimates containing the materials, internal activities and external activities that are regularly used. When processing a quotation, you enter these base object cost estimates in the cost estimate for the quotation and add further costing items specific to that customer's requirements. This gives you a basis for the quotation price in Sales (SD).

Reference when Planning Specific Reference Objects in the R/3 System

You create a base object cost estimate in which you list all the activities generally carried out by the marketing department during a trade fair. When you open an internal order for collecting the costs of a particular trade fair, you can copy the relevant costing items to the order and use them as a basis for planning the order.

You can create multiple base object cost estimates in which you plan the expected costs for the various components of a standard product. When you enter a quotation for a particular variant of this product in Sales and Distribution (SD), you can select the relevant costing items from the base object cost estimate, transfer them into the quotation and use them to process the quotation in SD.