The profession, cost engineering, developed largely on the basis of its usefulness to clients and contractors. Many of its activities have been determined through "common sense" and the need to achieve solutions to problems simply, within a limited timescale and at an economic price. Perspective makes a difference. To anyone looking at cost engineering as an academic discipline these words might imply a host of shortcomings, but looking at them from the perspective of a practitioner, these same words seem like a fair assessment of the spirit of Cost Engineering, if not its totality. In this paper we examine the practice of cost engineering consulting and specifically relate its application to the small businesses community. Considering the extremely large contribution of small businesses to the overall economy, this relationship has garnered surprisingly little specific attention in our literature. The first half of this paper is more general. In it we briefly describe the ongoing needs of many small businesses for the kinds of services and skills that our profession can provide. Next we present five principles we believe to be helpful to those providing consulting to small businesses. The second half of the paper describes a specific cost management consulting project undertaken by one of the authors. We examine potential solutions to this transportation problem using five principles as a means of demonstrating how Cost engineering at smaller companies may require substantially different techniques than those used at larger companies. Thus, it is our intention to add to the cost engineering discussion in three ways: explicitly addressing the relationship between Cost engineering and small business, providing cost engineering consultants with a set of guidelines that reflect our consulting experience and discussing an extensible example that illustrates the application of these principles to a particularly important problem of small businesses today, i.e. the management of transportation costs.
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