Cost lifecycle in vaccine industry
Résumé
ABSTRACT. During the last decade, pharmaceutical producers did not evaluate the products' price considering the real cost, but rather considering on what the market can bear. Currently, the competitive pressures pushes to better refine the products prices in the perspective of increasing the market share. The major concern in the vaccine industry is to compare the financial input of the released products batches with the invested amount to define the actual product cost. The variation of the product costs is generally presented as the results of demand levels or capacity use. The estimation of the actual product cost in the vaccine industry leans strategic planning directives to drive production level. In this paper, we propose an extension of an approach that we have recently proposed to calculate actual production costs, considering the integration of the information along the products' lifecycle. From the cost point of view, the product lifecycle has three major cost phases: (i) R&D program cost, (ii) procurement cost, and (iii) operating and support cost. For each phase, we will focus on the identification of fixed, variable or semi-variable costs.