A Research On Cost Management In Supply Chains

With the increasing global economic integration trend, enterprises face the rapid and unpredictable changes in buyer's market and personalized and diversification consumer demands which lead to the traditional mode of production response to the market slowly and passively. To further tap the potential of lowering products cost and meeting client needs, the eyes of enterprise change from managing the production process within the enterprise to throughout the supply chain. From the perspective of supply chain management, they carry out the entire production and business activities of enterprises and form the core competencies to enhance their market competitiveness.Currently, academic research in the field of supply chain more concentrated in supply chain modeling techniques, supply chain management technology and technical support of supply chain management. Supply chain's operation produces expenditures, namely supply chain costs. However, little research is currently involved in this area and lest from an accounting perspective. In view of this, the article is mainly about the cost management of supply chain theory explored shallowly from an accounting perspective.Firstly, the article defines and discriminates basic concept relate to cost management of supply chain and discussed the basic theory of supply chain cost management: strategic cost management, sophisticated cost management theory, transaction costs, commissioning theory and inter-organizational cost management. Secondly, the article explores the methods of supply chain cost management from three levels. The author thinks supply chain cost management includes three levels. The first lever is each node enterprises'cost accounting and management under supply chain environment, the second level is inter-organizational cost management and control between node enterprises and the third level is the reflect and control of the entire cost of supply chain. The methods of supply chain cost management include Cross-organizational Cost Management in the second level and Activity Based Costing (ABC) in the first and third level. In the end, the article notes that carrying out supply chain cost management smoothly needs corresponding organizations and information platform to support. So the author believes that enterprises should build process-oriented organizations and WEB based supply chain information system focusing on core businesses.