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Target Costing and Value Engineering, by Robin Cooper and Regine Slagmulder. Productivity Press, PO Box 13390, Portland, OR 97213-0309; 379 pages, hardcover, 1997. ISBN 1-56327-172-9.
Target Costing and Value Engineering is the first of a series of books entitled Strategies in Confrontational Cost Management, which is sponsored by the Institute of Management Accountants' Foundation for Applied Research, Inc. This series illustrates Japanese cost management practices; four additional volumes are being planned for publication.
Much of the material in this book appeared previously in Robin Cooper's book When Lean Enterprises Collide, which was published in 1995. Robin Cooper is also one of the original proponents of activity-based cost management.
The book has three main sections: Confrontational Cost Management; Target Costing and Value Engineering; and Cases (which includes seven case studies of Japanese firms to show how they use target costing and value engineering). The...