Field Notes
Cost-Centre Drift in Multi-Vendor Estates
Cost-centre drift happens when projects move, teams reorganise, or vendors rename services—while the allocation matrix stays frozen in last year's workbook.
In multi-vendor estates common across Taiwan manufacturers and regional headquarters, each vendor uses its own account hierarchy. Without a quarterly reconciliation, charges quietly land on default cost centres that no longer own the workload.
A useful check is the orphan test: list every active cost centre that received infrastructure charges last quarter and confirm a named owner still exists. Orphans signal either abandoned projects or mapping debt.
Another check is the concentration test: if one catch-all centre absorbs more than a defined share of unallocated spend, your model is no longer supporting accountability.
Fixing drift is usually a governance task, not a tooling task. Update the matrix, record who approved the change, and keep the prior version for audit trail continuity.