The foundation of costdata in 1997 goes back to our long-term experience in the automobile industry in the procurement department of the present Ford Werke GmbH, Germany. As buyers and cost analysts of numerous products we experienced in our daily work that the procurement department was frequently not able to evaluate, whether the prices paid were justified or not. Many value-analysis workshops we conducted directly at our supplier´s house did not help answering this question, because the procurement department had not the right means to realize, evaluate and establish existing saving potentials.

It was the lack of transparency in the procurement department that finally led to the foundation of the costdata GmbH. From the beginning our primary goal was to develop innovative software and consulting solutions in the domain of product cost calculation for our ambitious customers. A milestone on this way was the introduction of extensive databases in the year 2002, that further improved the objecitivity, quickness and simplicity of our customer´s calculations.

Being focused mainly on the requirements of procurement in the beginning we extended our solutions in the following years on all departments of the company, whose success is dominantly triggered by the availability and precision of high-performing product cost calculations. With our calculation solutions for controlling, development and distribution we did not only fulfil our customer´s need to profit from a common calculation base for entrepreneurial decisions. Moreover, we faciliated our customers to speak the same language.