...Activity Based Management A Summary Managerial Accounting Abstract Activity-based management (ABM) is an approach to management that directs the focus of cost managers towards activities analysis. Theoretically by concentrating on activities, this will increase the ability of management to control costs be improving efficiencies. Activity-based management (ABM) uses activity-based costing (ABC) information. ABM/ABC has been around for over 25 years and has gone through its peaks and valleys. This paper will give a short overview of ABM/ABC as well as discussing the main points of ABM including its goals, merits and drawbacks. Activity-Based Costing (ABC) “Where It Begins” for ABM Activity-based costing (ABC) is a costing method that assigns resource costs to products or services based on activities performed. The whole idea of this costing approach is that an organization’s products or services are produced or performed as a result of activities and activities use resources which incur costs. The costs of resources are assigned to activities based on the activities that use or consume resources and costs of activities are assigned to products or services based on activities performed. It is imperative in using ABC to identify the relationships between resource costs, cost drivers, activities, and products/services in assigning costs to activities and then from...
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...AND PROMOTING STRATEGY Activity-based Management – An Overview IN THIS BRIEFING… ctivity-based management and activity-based costing (ABM/ABC) have brought about radical change in cost management systems. ABM has grown largely out of the work of the Texas-based Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing-International (CAM-I). No longer is ABM’s applicability limited to manufacturing organisations. The principles and philosophies of activity-based thinking apply equally to service companies, government agencies and process industries. The acronym itself has evolved from ABC to ABCM (activity-based cost management) to ABM, and the application of ABC evolved from a manufacturing product costing orientation to a management philosophy of activity management applied in industries and organisations other than manufacturing. A Part 1 General FAQs Part 2 Practical guidance on implementing ABM ctivity-based costing and activity-based management have been around for more than fifteen years. Most forward-thinking companies have implemented them, or are in the process of doing so. A A A Part 3 Checklist Part 4 Further reading and bibliography BC is not a method of costing, but a technique for managing the organisation better. It is a one-off exercise which measures the cost and performance of activities, resources and the objects which consume them in order to generate more accurate and meaningful information for decision-making. ABM draws on ABC to provide management reporting...
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...CHAPTER 5 Activity-Based Management Chapter Outline A. Cost Management Challenges — Chapter 5 presents three questions to be answered in this chapter. 1. Is activity-based costing (ABC) enough by itself to improve efficiency? Can cost managers ensure that an organization will meet its efficiency goals merely by measuring costs more accurately by using ABC? 2. Does the cost manager’s responsibility end with making recommendations for improvements? Are the numbers generated by ABC, by themselves, enough to guide managers to correct decisions regarding resource use? 3. How does one know that activity-based methods of cost management are worthwhile? B. Learning Objectives — This chapter has six learning objectives. 1. The key steps of an activity-based management system are presented. 2. How to use activity-based costing for target costing. 3. Ways to identify and measure the costs of activities that do or do not add value in organizations. 4. How the elements of an ABM system can help to identify opportunities for process improvements. 5. Evaluate capacity utilization by identifying resources supplied and resources used. 6. Understand the methods and the problems of implementing ABC and ABM. C. Activities-based Management (ABM) allows managers to evaluate costs and values of process activities to identify opportunities for improved efficiency...
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...allocationmethodologies in firms can provide misleading information about the profitability of products, product lines, customers, and markets. Activity Based Costing (ABC) attempts to create the big picture, crystal-clear, full, and accurate information in a firm. The following are some of best practices of ABC for a multinational firm: Phase One includes assessment phase that included project planning, team training, development of resource matrices, and coordination with MIS and quality assurance organizations within the company. Phase Two, an analysis phase, includes functional area interviews, identification of the scope of the detailed information needed, identification of activities and activity drivers, and establishment of a timetable for identifying data collection needs. Phase Three, the design phase, involves model building for resources, activities, and cost objects as well as confirming the results. Phase Four includes the implementation of the ABC methodology into the various operations and plants around the world. This included verification and validation of the model results, interfacing with the local MIS system, and institutionalizing a lessons learned approach for correcting and improving the ABC system. ABC is also a tool in the Activity Based Management (ABM) effort of the complete manufacturing process. ABM not only determines product costs more accurately but also determines capital/resource expenditure prioritization, allows better organization...
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...CASE STUDIES IN PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT A Guide from the Experts TONY ADKINS John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CASE STUDIES IN PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT CASE STUDIES IN PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT A Guide from the Experts TONY ADKINS John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Copyright © 2006 by SAS Institute. All rights reserved. SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions...
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...Source: http://www.allbusiness.com/accounting-reporting/methods-standards-cost-accounting/498244-1.html#ixzz1nMWBS5qI By Juras, Paul E. ABSTRACT Descriptions of activity-based-costing (ABC) systems have become a standard part of managerial accounting texts. While ABC implementation issues are the focus of a number of articles, these issues are often not addressed in a typical textbook. This case is designed to familiarize you with the behavioral and technical variables that can aid or impede successful ABC implementation. Anderson's (1995) factor-stage model provides a template to organize the discussion of ABC success factors. In this case, you will be cast in the role of a business consultant. You are asked to synthesize the case study's key "change management" insights into a report that could be shared with co-workers in an intranet-based knowledge management system. In addition, you may be expected to prepare a formal presentation of the report for your peers. Implementing change in an organization is about ninety percent cultural and ten percent technical. This is because the organization dynamics, politics, and search for a champion that go on are the real issues that make or break the project. One of the reasons we were able to implement ABC successfully was because the right people became champions. Chris Richards, Director of MIS, Global Electronics, Inc. BACKGROUND Global Electronics, Inc. (GEI), headquartered in Sarasota, Florida, designs, manufactures...
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...The Emergence of Activity Based Costing The Traditional cost accounting methods were designed around 1870-1920 and in those days industry was labour intensive and there were no machinery. The product variety was small and the overhead costs in companies were generally low compared to today. During the 1980s, it became clear the conventional techniques for recovering overheads were increasingly providing the management with cost information that was inaccurate and misleading. As a result new techniques for overhead recovery were needed. In order to produce a more accurate costing system, cooper and Kaplan in 1987 developed a more refined approach for assigning overhead to products and computing product costs and called this approach Activity Based Costing (ABC). It was first clearly defined as a chapter in their book Accounting and Management: A field study perspective. (Kaplan, Roberts 1987). While mainly used for private businesses, ABC has recently been used in public forums, such as those that measure government efficiency Features of the ABC and Traditional costing system Activity Based Costing can be defined as an accounting methodology that assigns costs to activities based on their use of resources, rather than products or services. This enables resources and other associated costs to be more accurately attributed to the products and the services which they use. It doesn’t change or eliminate any costs; it provides detailed information about how costs are consumed...
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...Activity Based Management Activity Based Management Executive Summary: Management practices and methods have changed over the years and the organizations are moving to managing vertically to managing horizontally i.e. to move from functional orientation to horizontal orientation. TQM, JIT, BPR are all examples of horizontal management improvement initiatives. However management systems have lagged significantly in tracking and providing information about the horizontal aspects of business and Activity based costing /Activity based management mirrors this horizontal view. The focus of ABC is to provide accurate information about true costs of products, services, processes, activities etc. Activity based management makes this cost and operating information useful by providing value analysis ,cost drivers and performance measures to initiate, drive and support improvement efforts and to improve decision making abilities. This report deals with the application of ABM in American Seating company. Company was faced with increasing competition and it wanted to become a cost leader. The company lacked the information about true product and services cost to decide on which business areas to pursue. Company implemented ABM to conduct a detailed analysis of its activities and more accurately mirror resource consumption by process, product and customer. Company successfully identified customer profitability differences and achieved 40 % reduction in order processing costs...
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...(i) The differences in the reported cost estimates calculated under each of the two costing systems are significant. This is especially the case with regard to Job order 973. The management accountant’s calculations for the cost estimates produce the following increase/ (decrease) in reported costs: Job order 973 Job order 974 $ $ Unit cost per job under existing system 1,172·00 620·00 Unit cost per job under activity based costing 1,612·00 588·89 Increase/ (decrease) in reported cost 37·54% (5·02) % Job order 973 shows an increase in reported cost of 37·54% [(1,612 – 1,172)/1,172] whereas Job order 974 shows a decrease in reported cost of 5·02% [(88·89 – 620)/620]. A common occurrence when activity-based costing is implemented is that low-volume products show an increase in their reported costs while high-volume products show decreases in their reported costs. This is very much the case with regard to the products which are the subjects of Job orders 973 and 974. The reported costs also differ due to the following: – Job orders 973 and 974 differ in the way they consume activities in each of the five activity areas within SFS’s premises – The activity areas differ in their indirect cost allocation bases. In particular no activity area uses direct labor hours as the basis of allocating indirect costs. Two areas where...
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...MBA (2011-13) – Semester IV – ACTIVITY BASED COSTING ASSIGNMENT - LEARNING EXERCISE Students will select a company or firm or business unit in any one of the following industries: 1) Manufacturing 2) Insurance 3) Bank 4) Health care 5) Hospitality 6) Government 7) Service Each student should explore the internet for an example of a company that had implemented Activity Based Costing (ABC) and Activity Based Management (ABM) with a focus on determining customer profitability. Prepare a report (suggested length – not more than 10 pages) covering the following and give a briefing in the class: 1) Describe, in brief, the company and its business. 2) What was the problem faced by the business or company? 3) What was the scope of ABC / ABM project? 4) What were the goals for the ABC / ABM project? 5) How ABC/ABM was implemented? 6) Summarize the results achieved after implementation of the project. Financial evaluation of results by quantification expected. 7) Your observations, comments, criticism and suggestions, if any. 8) Legend, bibliography, references etc. Submit assignment to Exam Section. Print-out of PPTs (handout mode – 4 or 6 slides per page) can be submitted later, but before presentation in the class. Important: This is an individual assignment and each student should select different company from the sector selected for study and complete the...
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...ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING An organisation so as to be to comply with financial reporting requirements, the traditional cost accounting system is closely linked to its general ledger system. This in particular has to do with cost allocation. Mostly, costs are accounted either for valuation (i.e., financial statements analysis) or decision-making activities (i.e., internal purpose) or both. Meanwhile, sometimes the costs are accounted for reimbursement purposes (e.g., corporate health insurance, corporate travel). The traditional approach to cost-allocation manages three sequence of actions: a) Accumulate and account costs within a production or nonproduction business area, b) Allocate nonproduction business area costs to production business area, and c) Allocate the resulting (revised) production costs to various products, services, or customers. Costs hence derived using traditional allocation approach suffers from some defects that can result in incorrect costs for decision-making purposes. For example, the traditional approach attributes the cost of idle position to systems. Accordingly, such costs are recharged to entities that did not use it. In order to find solution to such anomalies, many organisations have adopted a separate cost-allocation methodology called Activity Based Costing (ABC). WHAT IS ACTIVITY BASED COSTING? In contrast to traditional cost-accounting framework, ABC framework first accumulate overhead costs for each organizational activity...
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...Activity-based management From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Activity-based management (ABM) is a method of identifying and evaluating activities that a business performs using activity-based costing to carry out a value chain analysis or a re-engineering initiative to improve strategic and operational decisions in an organization. Activity-based costing establishes relationships between overhead costs and activities so that overhead costs can be more precisely allocated to products, services, or customer segments. Activity-based management focuses on managing activities to reduce costs and improve customer value. Kaplan and Cooper (in Kaplan, R. S., & Cooper, R. (1998). Cost and effect: Using integrated cost systems to drive profitability and performance. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.) divide ABM into operational and strategic: Operational ABM is about “doing things right”, using ABC information to improve efficiency. Those activities which add value to the product can be identified and improved. Activities that don’t add value are the ones that need to be reduced to cut costs without reducing product value. Strategic ABM is about “doing the right things”, using ABC information to decide which products to develop and which activities to use. This can also be used for customer profitability analysis, identifying which customers are the most profitable and focusing on them more. A risk with ABM is that some activities have an implicit value, not...
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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...
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...H & R Block is one of the largest and oldest service providers. The company was founded by brothers Henry and Richard Bloch in 1955. The company began franchising in 1956 and they went public in 1962. The company employed over 100,000 tax professionals that are trained both within the U.S. and worldwide. The company has prepared more than 550 million tax returns since the business started in 1955. One key important key to the company success is that they have a retail office within 5 miles of most Americans. You are able to do your taxes both in person and on-line because H & R Block offers these services. The tax-payer can chose to walk into an office and work face-to-face with the tax specialist, they can work totally on their own using the online or packaged do-it-yourself tax prep tools, or they can utilize the do-it-yourself software with unlimited help from and online tax professional. H & R Block will offer you a wide variety of tax consulting services. Straight forward tax return offers the most basic start which is simple. You are able to accomplished this either on-line or in house. H & R Block also offer “drop off” service. A small business service is offered by H & R which includes helping the preparer to navigate the tax requirement of running a business. This is done throughout the year and not just a year-end service. H & R offers a service called “Best of Both”. This is where you get the convenience of doing it online with tax support preparation from...
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...School of Accounting, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia Abstract Purpose – The purpose of paper is to present a review of the literature on management accounting innovations (MAIs). Specifically, it explores recent developments in research on MAIs and offers suggestions for future research. The review differs from existing reviews by its specific focus on MAIs and the recent time period covered. In this paper, MAIs refer to the adoption of “newer” or modern forms of management accounting systems such as activity-based costing (ABC), activity-based management, time-driven ABC, target costing, and balanced scorecards. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a review of findings from journal articles published in 22 notable accounting journals. Findings – The review finds that research on MAIs has intensified during the period 2000-2008, with the main focus on exploring the extent to which a host of organizational and environmental factors influence the implementation and use of MAIs in organizations. In addition, research on MAIs indicates the dominant use of sociological theories and increasing use of empirical/field studies. Research limitations/implications – A literature review using a given set of accounting journals and search words used to identify relevant articles may overlook literature within the scope of the review. The paper concludes the importance of more research on MAIs by offering some...
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