This book gives an excellent overview of the topic, written in an easy understandable way. The authors have researched numerous articles and studies and compiled them into this work. The book also contains a lot of tables and graphs to illustrate the text. The foundations and the scope of target costing are well discussed and a small case study gives an idea how target costing is working in a practice. Moreover, there are a lot of references to literature and some examples from industry discussed. In the appendix there is a very useful collection of tools used in the target costing.

Definition and scope of target costing as explained in the book:

The target costing process is a system of profit planning and cost management that is price led, customer focused, design centred, and cross-functional. The target costing initiates cost management at the earliest stages of product development and applies it throughout the product life cycle by actively involving the entire value chain.

The difference between target costing and cost management is that the latter focuses on reducing the cost when they are already occurring, that means when the product design and the process are already defined. The target costing approach on the other hand helps to identify the allowable cost for a product in the design stage, the cost at the manufacturing stage are therefore known to be achievable and competitive. Further cost improvements are achieved by kaizen costing (continuous improvement).

this book is best for persons to understand the target costing indeeply with plain english. this book is also suitable for cost management in the globe.

This book provided more detail for target costings, more useful everyday, in both practical and theorical case. Moreover, this book use plain english for whoever in the world.