Discover the tools for knowing the costs your company should cut, without impacting its ability to deliver goods and services New from Steve Bragg, this book provides the tools for determining which costs a company should cut, without impacting its ability to deliver goods and services. It explains how to use throughput analysis in order to locate bottleneck operations in a company, which in turn dictates where capital investments should (and should not) be made. Delves into process analysis, to determine where excess resources are being used in a business process Describes the total cost of ownership, showing how a single purchasing decision actually snowballs into a variety of ancillary costs Shows how to create and use a spend management system to reduce procurement costs Shows how just-in-time systems can be used to eliminate inventory costs Cost Reduction Analysis: Tools and Strategies provides examples to show how much cost can potentially be eliminated to avoid drastic action later that can imperil your corporation's direction and future.

This Second Edition of Cost-Effectiveness Analysis continues to provide the most current, step-by-step guide to planning and implementing a cost analysis study. Henry M. Levin and Patrick J. McEwan use detailed and varied examples from studies and articles, ranging from education to public health, to introduce the principles and practice of cost-effectiveness analysis. The authors take account of both the costs and the effects of selecting alternatives, and suggest methods of minimizing the costs of research. New to this edition: expanded coverage of cost effectiveness from types of technique to use, to how to interpret the data; the latest information on cost benefits analysis and how to relate it to outcome measures; in-depth chapter-end exercises to enable readers to sharpen their ability to evaluate policy options and program effectiveness; feedback appendix for readers to evaluate their responses to exercises; comprehensive bibliography of methodological sources on cost analysis and educational settings grouped by category. This thorough volume primes the reader to deal with any evaluation situation by studying cost-effective analysis in relation to cost-benefit analysis, cost-utility analysis, and cost-feasibility analysis.

In this book the authors explore the state of the art on efficiency measurement in health systems and international experts offer insights into the pitfalls and potential associated with various measurement techniques. The authors show that: - The core idea of efficiency is easy to understand in principle - maximizing valued outputs relative to inputs, but is often difficult to make operational in real-life situations - There have been numerous advances in data collection and availability, as well as innovative methodological approaches that give valuable insights into how efficiently health care is delivered - Our simple analytical framework can facilitate the development and interpretation of efficiency indicators.

Choice is the name of the game. Government sets the size of the public budget and decides which public projects it will invest in and which transfers and regulations it will implement. To do this systematically the government must have a procedure that displays the consequences of the alternatives. This book is an exposition of benefit-cost analysis (BCA), an analytic framework for organizing thoughts, listing the pros and cons of alternatives, and determining values for all relevant factors so that the alternatives can be ranked. A major question illuminated by this text is whether the results of such an analysis can instruct government--in the sense of telling it what it must do to avoid being labelled stupid, corrupt, irrational, and/or inefficient. How and when, we will ask, can the benefit-cost analyst label a particular governmental investment, policy, or regulation as political (in the pejorative sense) as opposed to economic (in the laudatory sense of being economically justified)? This book will argue that BCA is much like a consumer information system. Consumer information neither tells consumers what to do nor tells them what they should want. However, it does tell them which products will perform in selected ways and at what costs. And this information, together with the independently arrived at wants, helps the consumer make intelligent choices.