Hi,
Not sure if I understood your question correctly, however the best source of cost structures will be:
1) Cases - you simply solve 50-70 cases and get a broad knowledge of different industries, common pitfalls and questions. The key here - find good partners who already had case interviews with MBB companies
2) Company reports, equity reports, IB roadshow docs - usually have a good overview of company and industries. The most useful sources to understand what's going on with the companies
3) HBS cases - quite useful, but not sure if lot's of them available publically. Probably worth buying
4) Books - one good book about airlines with numbers and industry analysis can give you all needed industry knowledge. Just use the Kindle search
5) News, Industry blogs
You may approach cost-related problems in the following way:
1) Operational math problems. (e.g. Should we increase the speed of the elevator or just buy a second one? How should we reduce the queues? How should we increase the output of a factory?).
Structuring:
- Usually, you have to look at the process. Even the most complicated systems have the inflows and outflows
The key concepts that you have to learn:
- Capacity and utilization (both machine and people)
- Cycle time, Throughput time, Little's Law
- How the does lowest cycle time influence the production? (Lead time = cycle time of the slowest process)
- How can we mitigate the bottlenecks with low cycle time? (Buffer, Parallel process, speeding up)
2) Cost cutting cases
Structuring:
- What is the cost composition and what are the biggest costs
- Benchmarking of the biggest costs to find the improvement potential
- Process improvements to meet the benchmarks
- Costs and benefits of the proposed initiatives
The key concepts that you have to learn:
- Internal / external benchmarking
- Idle time
- Core processes (usually are optimized) and the supporting processes (usually are cut)
- Math structures (Frequency of operations * time per operation)
- Other useful structures (e.g. people - process - technology)
3) Bottleneck cases (e.g. Huge write-offs in the meat store or bottleneck on the bridge)
Structuring:
You draw a value chain and go through it to find a bottleneck.
E.g. for the meat write-offs it will be:
- Supplier issues (packaging, meat quality, warehousing)
- Transportation (Length, fridges)
- Store (Refrigerators in the warehouse, in-store fridges, demand for the meet)
Feel free to reach me for further help with these cases.
Best