Preliminary Research on Cost Management in Supply Chains

The cost management is the core of enterprises' internal management. The Supply-chain cost is a new term in modem cost management science. With the rapidly changing market environment and sever industrial competition pressure, the competition between the enterprises has developed to the competition between supply-chain. The management in supply chains is the main driving force for gaining competitive advantage in supply-chain cost. The cost management should be an important problem in the field of supply-chain management. Cost management in supply chains is a kind of method with inter-organizational cost management by analyzing and controlling. This paper briefly analyses the mutual integration between supply-chain management and cost management. It expounds the connotation, function and characteristics of inter-organizational cost management. It builds the conceptual framework with inter-organizational cost management from three aspects such as activities, objectives and methods.