Integrated Virtual Cooperation in Product Costing in the Discrete Manufacturing Industry: A Problem Identification

Virtual collaboration in corporations is an important factor for working efficiently without the limitations of time and place. As a business domain, product costing is characterized by a high demand for communication, coordination, and information exchange. Nevertheless, practitioners point out that product costing does not exhibit a modern tool-based collaborative practice. Thus, this paper examines the collaborative process in product costing. An exploratory study shows that, in practice, the way of collaboration is still very traditional, often relying on e-mail and lacking integrated IT support. Contributing to the overall workload with almost 90%, collaboration in product costing has a high potential for improvements in productivity and consistency. As a showcase, the study reveals that virtual cooperation has not been integrated into particular business areas and that there is a need to find ways to enable and support such specific forms of virtual cooperation.