Many manufacturing companies use a standard costing system to focus employees on meeting the standards set and minimize product costs. The benefit is maintaining production costs and efficiencies, but there are costs in a standard costing environment such as internal competition or looking for improvement beyond a set standard. Companies need to focus on costs to stay competitive more than ever before and continuously evaluating standards looking for improvements is one approach.

Working for a company that focuses on minimizing every cost can be very difficult and limiting in employee growth, but maybe that is what companies have to do to be competitive. What do you think?