Marc Wouters

2021

One major idea for cloud computing business is the economy of scale, highlighting that capacity planning plays a critical role for the business success. However, current literature for Management Accounting does not provide any insights into the specific cloud computing capacity planning issue. The goal of this work is to close gaps, which exist between the practitioners and the literature. Therefore, an interventionist research takes place at SAP, a company focusing to cloud computing. There, the departments avoid portfolio-based purchases and prefer product-based purchases, which are not optimal according to the Management Accounting literature. Consequently, the research wants to answer how cloud companies can increase collaboration in capacity planning. Within the, alongside with the experts of the company, extended resource usage profile (RUP) concept, implementation issues and the usefulness of the experience-based RUP measure are answered. The first finding is that the collaboration and capacity planning are influenced due to the perceived fairness of a cost allocation and higher-level management request for increased product cost transparency. Both can be avoided, according to the expert’s estimation, with the usage of the RUP concept. The RUP concept is only proofed in the literature for internal cost allocation charges in online transactional processing (OLTP) environments within the automotive industry. This work shows that the concept can be adapted, according to industry expert’s estimation, but that within the software industry information asymmetry appears. In addition, a further finding is that the concept of RUP is not widely known in the software industry. The third and last finding is that the experience-based RUP often includes safety buffers and overestimates the real consumption.