What a great and insightful question! I can tell you from experience, that the forecasting and management of costs spent is an extremely important aspect of any company, let alone a medical company. In a medical or big pharma company, cost projections and inventory management for various materials and products (both expirables and not) play a major role in the manufacturing and production side that allows them to continually meet demand of the market.

If there was an improper estimation of costs for a product, the impact would depend on the type of improper usage. If it is an overshoot, it is generally considered okay to a margin because there should be some slight over-ordering to account for unexpected increased shifts in demand or emergency situations that might require additional inventory to cover. However, undershooting the estimation of costs can leave a company immobilized to meet demand and take action on those aforementioned shifts in market demand or emergencies, which could force the company to spend more money than intended if in terms of economies of scale.

Nonetheless, it is important to have cost forecasts and projections to be accurately reflective of the market demand, material cost, and other unexpectancies, BUT it is generally better to have more than less of cost projections.

Well, this question is interesting. I experience this during my research work. During one of my research works, I miscalculated costs and resources. Therefore, the project timeline increased significantly. I had to change my whole plan. I needed more money. I had to contact more collaborators. It was very hard to arrange a collaborator in the middle of the project. Moreover, I also miscalculated my resources. my teammates could not work as much as I expected. In the lecture, Dr. Simon mentioned that teammates may also work on some other projects. We have to consider it during project planning. I missed it during my research project planning. Therefore, project time also suffers significantly. 

At the onset of my senior capstone course, each team was required to make budget that is composed of both the product budget (accounts for all of the materials the final device is composed of) and the developmental budget (accounts for all of the materials used in the developmental phases of the product). As we were instructed to create this budget at the beginning of the course, it was somewhat difficult, as we were not sure exactly what problems we could run into throughout our project that could incur additional costs. We estimated the costs as much as possible for both product and developmental materials, but this is not entirely possible to do without knowing what will and won't go wrong. At this point in the course, we have just began the construction phase of our device and are experiencing issues with what we thought would be an effective method of assembling our product. We will likely have to spontaneously budget for a different means of assembling our device (a special adhesive that we hope will be compatible with the material of our device). However, if we are not satisfied with the results of this adhesive, we will likely have to order and budget for multiple adhesives in a trial-and-error series of testing. As of right now, we have a little over a month to manage this budget before our final device must be completed, so we are currently on schedule, however, throughout the construction of our device, we will likely encounter more issues that could impact our project schedule. Hopefully, we will be able to meet the deadline for our complete product and not encounter too detrimental of issues that break our budget tremendously. 

I have had experiences where projects have been dropped because of improper funding or lack of resources especially after a lot of work have been put into it. This hurts the company a lot in the short-term because all the resources, tools, equipment, and documents that came out of that project needed to be destroyed or disposed of in a proper manner. The worst part is when teams have dedicated a lot of time and effort researching, planning, and executing a project that have taken months or even years to complete when all of the sudden the company decides to stop the program. It can hurts both the team and the stake holders of that company so every medical device company should prioritize rigorous feasibility studies, risk assessments, and resource allocation strategies.