scope:

The purpose of the guideline is, in conjunction with the guideline VDI 3300 "Materialfluss-Untersuchungen (Material flow studies)", to provide instructions for the calculation of the costs of a company's internal material flow (MF). "Internal" refers to all movements of materials between the incoming goods and dispatch departments of the company, regardless of the number of production plants.

The guideline focuses on the material flow costs (MFC) for products and their components. Two approaches for cost registration, analysis and allocation are applied:

• the factor costs-oriented representation of the product MFC based on the input factors (material, personnel, capital, supplies and services), and
• the process costs-oriented representation of the product MFC based on the processes (development, acquisition, production, distribution, etc.).

The guideline describes procedures and decision aids (operative cost management) which can be derived from them. Typical MF analysis tasks are illustrated using simplified practical examples.

The situations described in Section 4, Section 5, and Section 8 contain generally applicable statements for cost accounting which are relevant to all forms of cost analysis. They can be applied directly to MFC analyses.