A Guide to AACE Certified Cost Professional Certification

Explore cost elements, including direct, indirect, fixed, and variable costs, and learn estimation, forecasting, lifecycle cost, and cost accounting for asset and project optimization.

Delve into materials management, covering just-in-time and economic order quantity, quality control, supplier prequalification, and efficient handling techniques to optimize project cost, availability, and maintenance.

Analyze direct vs indirect labor, including on-site and home office staff, and explain how fringe benefits, overtime, overhead, and profit shape the fully loaded billing rate.

Explore how engineering roles drive project success through CAD/CAM, prototyping, and manufacturability, while examining research types, trade secrets, product liability, standardization, outsourcing decisions for the AACE certified cost professional certification.

Explore machinery and equipment valuation, including replacement and market values, various liquidation scenarios, data sources, and factors shaping residual value and inflation adjustments.

Analyze economic cost using time-value methods to compare alternatives and select feasible projects. Explore opportunity costs, depreciation, inflation, taxes, and cost–benefit metrics like npv, payback, and benefit-cost ratio.

Learn activity-based costing (ABC) for cost management, allocating costs by activities and cost drivers to improve visibility, enable improvement opportunities, and handle diverse, complex product lines.

learn to perform operating and manufacturing cost estimates to assess profitability, covering variable and fixed costs, depreciation, amortization, byproduct credits, utilities, labor, contingencies, capital costs, and distribution.

Explore discrete manufacturing concepts, including group technology, just-in-time, lean manufacturing, and cost analysis from prime cost to break-even and markup for pricing.

Define objectives and develop a future oriented plan by gathering information, evaluating feasible alternatives, and communicating and implementing the plan with focus on cost, schedule, and quality.

Explore scheduling for projects by using work breakdown structures, duration estimation, and network diagrams, and apply critical path analysis with bar charts, three-point estimates, and precedence diagramming.

Learn how earned value management measures project performance by comparing planned value, earned value, and actual cost, and use CPI, SPI, and EAC for forecasting and variances.

Analyze how performance and productivity management identifies inefficiencies, minimizes waste, and boosts profits through metrics like the success index, productivity index, and earned value concepts.

Explore fundamentals of project management, defining a project and applying integrated processes to manage time, cost, quality, procurement, risk, and communication across programs and portfolios.

Explore project organization structures, functional and matrix variants, and how project managers allocate resources, coordinate cross-functional teams, and apply Deming’s quality management concepts for reimbursable contracts.

Explore how to manage project communications by identifying stakeholders, setting expectations, and selecting channels to suit influence and interest, using active listening, feedback, and effective written and virtual team practices.

Chapter 19 links labor cost control to productivity drivers, showing wage times quantities predict cost. Planning and control narrow cost outcomes; location, complexity, leadership, and tool availability shape productivity.

Explore leadership and management of project people through Maslow's needs and McGregor's X and Y theory. Learn four leadership styles to foster commitment and high performance in project teams.

Identify stakeholder needs and expectations to drive project quality; explain conformance, precision, accuracy, and the cost of quality with tools like control charts and flowcharts.

Explore value engineering and value analysis to improve project value by evaluating cost-effective alternatives early in design, applying value management principles, and implementing changes to boost productivity and environmental impact.

Understand the fundamentals of contracting for capital projects, including enforceable agreements, offer and acceptance, legality of purpose, change orders, and common contract types such as lump-sum and unit-price.

Explore strategic asset management from the asset owner perspective, applying cost management and the PCM cost-benefit framework to optimize a portfolio of assets through front end loading.

Learn a change management guide for aviation project control, including tracking scope changes, notifying variances, assessing impacts, managing contingencies and reserves, resolving disputes, and executing a team-based change control process.

Explore twenty-six common construction claims and disputes, including change orders, delays, suspensions, force majeure, and termination, plus methods to analyze entitlement, damages, and dispute resolution.

Apply time value of money to cash flow analysis and capital budgeting. Evaluate investments using net present value and internal rate of return, considering depreciation, salvage value, and taxes.

Bridge investment decision making and economic analysis by teaching project teams to present front-end loading concepts to senior executives for funding.

Explore descriptive and inferential statistics, population and sample concepts, and qualitative versus quantitative data. Learn about mean, median, mode, variance, standard deviation, normal distribution, z-scores, binomial and regression analysis.

Learn how to maximize profit through linear programming under constraints, using an example with three- and four-bedroom homes, and explore Monte Carlo simulation and sensitivity analysis for risk assessment.

Explore risk management, including risk types and risk premium, and apply SWOT, EMV analysis, decision trees, Monte Carlo simulations, and sensitivity analysis to plan and mitigate risk.

Explore risk management fundamentals and practical techniques within the total cost management framework, including risk planning, identification, assessment, mitigation, and Monte Carlo analysis.

Explore how total cost management integrates strategic asset management and project control. Trace the asset and project lifecycles, from ideation to termination, and highlight value and risk management.