Implementation of Target Costing System Based on Net Present Value in a Fuzzy environment

Target costing (TC) is defined as a systematic process of managing product costs during the design stage of a new product, establishing market sales prices, and target profit margins as well as reducing the overall cost of the products over their life cycles. However, most studies do not examine some factors influencing the adoption of TCsystems for manufacturing firms, and consequently exclude service firms from their surveys and analysis. Furthermore, they do not take into account an uncertain environment in a TC system. This paper tries to overcome these shortcomings in existing researches by considering some of the most important features of real world TC in a novel and practical TC model under an uncertain environment. To fill these research gaps, in this paper, a target costing system is adopted for making production-related decision for a manufacturing firm byconsidering the obtained values in the product and also the net present value of cash flows. As the definitions and measurements of variablesin a target costing involve varying degrees of uncertainty and ambiguity, fuzzy set theory and Monte Carlo method are utilized. Thisstudy shows the importance of attributes of TC (namely relative advantage, compatibility, ease of use, result demonstrability, trialability)for decision makers to adopt and implement such cost and management accounting innovation. Finally, a numerical example as acase study is investigated to demonstrate the applicability of theproposed model and solution approach. The results indicate that the proposed fuzzy TC can be useful among the manufacturing and service firms.

Keywords:

Target costing , Net present value , Fuzzy set