Logistics cost management: insights on tools and operations

Logistics cost are very important in the composition of company management costs. However, visible unfitness is noticed in traditional costing methods to supply adequate data for right management, making people using specific management tools: total cost of ownership, customer profitability analysis, direct product profitability and activity‐based costing. Besides, over the years it was presented an incomplete view about the composition of total logistics cost. So, this article's proposal is to introduce some classifications which enable listing each of the main elements that are part of logistics cost; to discuss the use of tools that can make management easier, identifying, measuring and evincing them, considering also the existing countertrading among elements in total logistics cost determination, called trade‐offs. This study is theoretical/conceptual, basic, qualitative, descriptive and bibliographic, which aimed to analyse, in periodical articles collected in relevant fonts of research, necessary and important concepts for discussion about the central topic.