COMEX: A cost management expert system

Abstract

Understanding and using cost management is a key to success in any type of organization, because it helps managers to collect important data about the costs assigned to products, services and customers and use it for planning and control function. This paper discusses development and application of an expert system for reasonable cost related decision making and continuous cost management process improvement. The system is called COMEX (cost management expert system). This paper also shows how COMEX can be used for improvement of the billing department business processes. COMEX relies on information generated using the activity-based costing (ABC) method, accounting method based on activities, created to improve cost management system by focusing on the driver costs of individual activities. Still, this paper focuses on design and implementation of the COMEX system, and only briefly surveys the ABC method.