Controlling Contract Cost: Introducing Total Cost of Usage to support the management accounting system

This research is conducted within the contract management division of ‘Groep 7’ of MST Enschede. It focuses on improving the understanding of costs related to a contract and can be considered part of a large body of research in cost management and management accounting. The contracts at MST can be described as long-term service contracts, varying from external laboratory research to general cleaning services. The goal of the research is to develop a method (or tool) to improve cost control on contracts based on the philosophy of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This conditionally designed tool would be an addition to the current management accounting system. During the research it was found that there was no proper (cost)data available, so it was impossible to produce an implementation of the tool within the time available for the study. Therefore the result of this research is a process tool named Total Cost of Usage.