We publish the method we practise.
In short. Cost and Profitability Consulting works from published, peer-reviewed evidence, not proprietary mystique. Miguel Guimarães co-authored a peer-reviewed TDABC study on the cost per patient in a dialysis unit, lectures at SKEMA Business School, and speaks at industry conferences. The same method taught in those rooms is the method used in client engagements.
Peer-reviewed research · SKEMA Business School · Lisbon, São Paulo, Riyadh
Consultants often ask to be trusted. We prefer to be checked.
This page collects what is public and verifiable about how we work: the peer-reviewed research, the teaching, the talks and the workshop track record. It exists so that a sceptical CFO, a procurement team or a journal reader can trace our method back to sources that do not belong to us.
What did the dialysis study measure?
Miguel Guimarães co-authored a peer-reviewed study applying time-driven activity-based costing to a dialysis unit, measuring the true cost per patient across the treatment pathway. CONFIRM: full citation — journal, co-authors, year, DOI — inserted verbatim from the published record
The study matters for two reasons beyond healthcare. First, it demonstrates the method under academic scrutiny: capacity cost rates and time equations applied to real clinical resources, with the working shown. Second, dialysis is a stress test for costing. Chronic pathways, shared clinical capacity and regulated tariffs punish sloppy models. A method that survives peer review there travels well to warehouses and factories.
We apply the same discipline in commercial engagements that the journal demanded in print: defined practical capacity, explicit time equations, and results a third party could re-derive from the data.
Our method has been peer-reviewed. Our opinions have not, which is why we lead with the method.
What does the SKEMA lectureship involve?
Miguel lectures at SKEMA Business School, teaching cost and profitability management to CONFIRM: programme name and student audience, e.g. MSc cohort, and teaching subject title. Teaching forces clarity. A model that cannot survive forty questions from a classroom does not deserve a boardroom.
The material taught draws on the same cases and methods documented across this site: TDABC mechanics, capacity cost rates, cost-to-serve analysis and the whale curve, illustrated with anonymised engagement data.
We speak where practitioners gather, not only where consultants do.
- Amsterdam Costing ConferenceCONFIRM: talk title, session and year
- LEAPCONFIRM: talk or session details and year
- Further talksCONFIRM: any additional talks Miguel wants listed, with verifiable details only
Slides and, where organisers permit, recordings are available on request. We do not list a talk we cannot evidence.
Where has the method been taught hands-on?
We run hands-on TDABC workshops in Lisbon, São Paulo and Riyadh, in which finance teams build a working costing model during the session using CostCtrl, our modelling platform. Participants leave with a model, not a certificate of attendance. CONFIRM: number of workshops delivered and cumulative participant count
The workshop format is deliberately the same as the consulting method: map the operating model, define practical capacity, write time equations, attribute cost, read the whale curve. What changes between a workshop and an engagement is only whose data is on the screen.
Three positions, stated plainly so they can be argued with.
TDABC over classic ABC, for maintainability
Interview-based ABC produces good first answers and dead models. Time equations on transactional data keep a model alive at operational scale. This is why the 525,000-row logistics model and the dialysis pathway model use the same machinery.
Practical capacity over actual volume
Rates built on actual volumes punish you for quiet periods and flatter you in busy ones. Cost of capacity supplied divided by practical capacity produces stable rates and makes unused capacity a visible, manageable line.
Client-owned models over consultant-owned reports
Every engagement ends with the client's team running the model. Evidence that outlives the engagement is the only kind worth producing.
We change our minds in public when the evidence says so, and we footnote what we borrow. The intellectual debts here are mainly to Kaplan and Anderson's TDABC work and the broader activity-based costing literature; we claim application depth, not invention.
FROM RESEARCH TO PRACTICE
Fair questions.
- Where can I read the dialysis study?
- Through the publishing journal. CONFIRM: link or DOI If you cannot access it, contact us and we will point you to the legitimate route to the text.
- Is CostCtrl part of the research?
- The research validates the method; CostCtrl is the tooling we built to apply that method repeatably. The studies stand on their own regardless of the software.
- Can you run a workshop for our finance team?
- Yes. The in-company format mirrors the public workshops in Lisbon, São Paulo and Riyadh: one day, your team, a working model built live. Ask through the contact page.
- Do you publish client results as research?
- Only with consent and only anonymised, as in the case studies section. We never publish client-confidential figures, and where a client has not approved a number, we do not print one.
Check us before you hire us.
Read the case studies, then bring your hardest question to a 30-minute call with a senior partner.