Case study Cost allocation: Requirements for the solution

Purpose of the cost allocation is to show how much particular services, products, customers, departments, programmes etc. cost. It is a process of identification and assignment of cost to these cost objects. 

We will work in this particular case study with following requirements:

1. Our final goal is to know cost breakdown in particular years to countries and teams.

2. Users are always assigned to a country and can be assigned also to a team. The solution allows assignment of the user into more countries and more teams at the same time in order that we reflect situations when:

• user works for more teams
• user changes team or country during the year

3. We will distribute following types of costs:

• All the invoices coming to IT including invoices representing investments (these invoices can be breaken down in the solution into more periods). Due to this the solution does not work with depreciation.
• Salaries of IT employees. Time reported by the IT team for particular activities and evaluated by a standard rate determined by the IT team.

4. We will assign these costs in the following way.

• Directly to a particular country and team
• Directly to a particular country - corresponding amounts are automatically assigned also to teams depending on how many users assigned in the given period to the given country were members of the given team
• To a user
• To a group of users
• To a service

5. We can derive assignment to country and team for users and groups of users beacuse this information will be maintained by the system (see above).

6. Assignment to a service provides perspective of what the customers actually pay for. We will distinguish following types of services:

• Server infrastructure - it will have a special model for cost distribution
• Print - it will have a special model for cost distribution
• Storage - it will have a special model for cost distribution
• Applications and services like Security minimum - will be distributed to user groups that will be defined at the services

7. Assignment of users to teams, countries and groups will be taken over from MS Active Directory.

8. Costs assigned to servers will be distributed according to to the number of CPU, GB RAM a GB of disk storage of particular servers. Weights of these parameters will be configurable.

9. Cost assigned to particular servers are further distributed by means of assignment of servers to countries and teams or to services.

10. Costs assigned to Print are distributed to users according to how much they printed.

11. Cost assigned to disk storage are distributed to users according to the volume of their data.

12. The solution contains reporting for distribution of cost to countries and teams.