Research Summaries

Back Financial Reporting of Historical Costs for Acquisition

Fiscal Year 2014
Division Graduate School of Business & Public Policy
Department Graduate School of Business & Public Policy
Investigator(s) Wang, Chong
Sponsor Marine Corps Systems Command (Marine Corps)
Summary Cost estimation relies on historical data - what it cost the last time we bought some analogous system - to estimate the acquisition cost of the new system. Due to the heavy reliance on Firm Fixed Price (FFP) contracting, historical costs have not been collected for the majority of ACAT III and IV programs. In fact, for the preponderance of Marine Corps Systems Command (MCSC) acquisition programs, that historical information is not readily accessible. However, the Marine Corps has an extremely robust accounting system in SABRS. SABRS has at least five years of historical data that may be leveraged if the accounting data could be associated with an individual acquisition program.
Potential Study Areas:
How can SABRS and the accounting data be leveraged to provide this historical insight into the cost of previous acquisitions?
Develop a structure for future acquisition contracting that clearly classifies costs according to WBS and links the accounting data to the acquisition program?
Keywords
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal