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Activity Based Cost Management

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Submitted By ernie64
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Activity-based Cost Management
--An Executive’s Guide

Gary Cokins
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction
The concept of Activity-based cost management was born from the belief that traditional costing systems have inherent limitations that do not accurately assign indirect and overhead costs in all situations. Managers that are familiar with their organization’s operations know that different products and services consume these costs in varying proportion, but traditional costing systems tend to spread these costs evenly over all products and services offered. Assignment of overhead costs based on direct labor hours or square footage occupied by facility do not always serve as accurate means of allocation. Costing accuracy enables decision-making that is less likely to result in poor performance, and provide organizations with competitive advantages. Activity-based cost management is a means to solve this problem.
In its early years, Activity-based cost management (ABC/M) gained popularity rapidly in the management consulting community. It was oversold as the “magic pill” to solve almost every problem within an organization, and the expectations of management were raised too high. As a result, many early implementations of ABC/M were viewed as failures. Some of these perceived failures were resultant from design misunderstandings and others from an inability to interpret the data produced. Management didn’t understand that ABC/M is meant to act as an enabler to for better decision-making, and can enhance popular performance improvement programs such as Total Quality Management.
Activity-based cost management has been faced with numerous difficulties as being accepted as a worthwhile change. Poor implementations created organizational shock, and adoption throughout did not occur overnight. Users had tendencies to misuse the system as a policing

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