...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 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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...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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...Activity-based costing, or ABC, is a method of assigning costs to products or services based on the resources that they consume. this is a more logical manner than the traditional approach of simply allocating costs on the basis of machine hours. Activity based costing first assigns costs to the activities that are the real cause of the overhead. It then assigns the cost of those activities only to the products that are actually demanding the activities. Activity-based costing became popular in the early 1980s largely because of growing dissatisfaction with traditional ways of allocating costs. After a strong start, however, it fell into a period of discredit. Even Robert Kaplan, a Harvard Business School professor sometimes credited with being its founding father, has admitted that it stagnated in the 1990s. The difficulty lay in translating the theory into action. Many companies were not prepared to give up their traditional cost-control mechanisms in favour of ABC. ABC is linked to Lean Practices because you are able to trace each cost of production or service to its root, which enables management to make improvements by being able to see how much is going to each and every part of the process or service. This allows you to see if you are spending too much in one area, or possibly too little. activity based costing can give management a larger view of the costs of process or service. activity analysis can highlight waste and have been used for straightforward cost reduction...
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...Advanced Management Accounting UMAC3J-20-3 Assignment 2012/2013 Monday 10th December 2012 09016707 The Development of the Techniques of Activity Based Costing, Budgeting and Management from the 1990s to the Present Day. Executive Summary: This report aims to explore the developments of activity based costing, budgeting and management from the 1990’s to the present day. This report aims to evaluate the criticisms made during this period by Kaplan and Cooper, and to use a range of theories and developments to assess whether these criticisms have been overcome. The use of case studies to evaluate these changes in practice will give supporting evidence to the changes that have been made. Introduction to Kaplan and Cooper’s Criticisms: Since 1987 when H. Thomas Johnson and Robert S. Kaplan wrote ‘Relevance Lost: the rise and fall of Management Accounting’, there have been significant developments in the traditional cost accounting methods used at the time; these mainly being absorption and marginal costing. Although these methods are “geared toward compliance with financial reporting requirements”1, they often resulted in misleading and inaccurate cost information used by managers. Traditional costing methods use a ‘blanket’ overhead recovery rate which meant when the number of overhead costs increased with more complex production schemes, cost allocations were inaccurate. This method was now “invalid relative to how the products and services consumed costs”2. With...
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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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...Activity-based management in a small company 1. What are the major benefits of activity-based management? ABM provides utilizes value analysis, cost drivers and performance measures in order to improve the decision making processes of the organization. Major benefits include – a) ABM provides a formal management system in understanding the contribution to achieve strategic objectives of the organization. b) It helps managers in emulating best practices and establishing process controls ensuring consistently good performance. c) It supports continuous improvement by providing managers with new insights into value adding and non-value adding activities and business processes 2. Why managing operations and activities is not a custodial task? Managing operations and activities is a continuous improvement process rather than being a custodial task. A structured approach to continual improvement is shown in the figure below: 3. How activity-based costing works with activity-based management? ABC is not a method of costing, but a technique 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. It helps in gaining a thorough understanding of the business processes and cost behaviour. ABM, on the other hand, utilizes this information to manage activities and make informed decisions about lines of business, product mix, processes and product...
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...Chapter 7 Activity-Based Costing and Management LEARNING OBJECTIVES Chapter 7 addresses the following questions: Q1 How is activity-based costing (ABC) different from traditional costing? Q2 What are activities, and how are they identified? Q3 What process is used to assign costs in an ABC system? Q4 How are cost drivers selected for activities? Q5 What is activity-based management (ABM)? Q6 What are the benefits, costs, and limitations of ABC and ABM? These learning questions (Q1 through Q6) are cross-referenced in the textbook to individual exercises and problems. COMPLEXITY SYMBOLS The textbook uses a coding system to identify the complexity of individual requirements in the exercises and problems. Questions Having a Single Correct Answer: No Symbol This question requires students to recall or apply knowledge as shown in the textbook. e This question requires students to extend knowledge beyond the applications shown in the textbook. Open-ended questions are coded according to the skills described in Steps for Better Thinking (Exhibit 1.10): Step 1 skills (Identifying) ...
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...Research on Internal Medicine & Public Health Specifics of the Activity-Based Applications in Hospital Management Boris Popesko * Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic * Corresponding Author; Email: popesko@fame.utb.cz Abstract Paper analyses the specifics of the application of Activity-Based Costing method in hospital management. Primary objective of the paper is to outline the methodology of the ABC application in hospitals. First part of the paper analyzes the ways of ABC implementation in published foreign studies. Second part describes the individual steps in ABC application and discusses the differences in the application procedures between the manufacturing and hospital organization. Key words: Healthcare Management, Cost Management, Activity-based costing, Introduction In the last decade, many non-profit and hospital organizations started to face difficulties and challenges in balancing limited resources and costs to provide their demand for services. Due to the introduction of modern medical techniques and medicines and consequent increase of consumed costs, many hospitals are under pressure to adopt more advanced cost management techniques usually utilized only in profit organization sector. Hospital managers frequently seek the advanced techniques, for better understanding of relations between the cost and provided services. One of the key factors of effective company management is ability of accurate estimation of the cost of products. Product...
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...C H A P T E R F I V E INTRODUCTION TO COST MANAGEMENT Activity-Based Costing and Management After studying this chapter, you should be able to . . . 1. Explain the strategic role of activity-based costing 2. Describe activity-based costing (ABC), the steps in developing an ABC system, and the benefits and limitations of an ABC system 3. Determine product costs under both the volume-based method and the activity-based method and contrast the two 4. Explain activity-based management (ABM) 5. Describe how ABC/M is used in manufacturing companies, service companies, and governmental organizations 6. Use an activity-based approach to analyze customer profitability 7. Identify key factors for successful ABC/M implementation PART I Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship. Benjamin Franklin This chapter has a lot to do with implementing the spirit of Benjamin Franklin’s observation—in cost management terms—that it really does matter how accurately you calculate a cost. Why? Having accurate costs is important for a variety of reasons: a company might find that it has a difficult time determining which of its products is most profitable. Alternatively, it finds its sales increasing but profits declining and cannot understand why. Perhaps the company keeps losing competitive bids for products and services and does not understand why. In many cases, accurate cost information is the answer to these questions. Accurate cost information provides a competitive...
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...2010-023X Factors Influencing Activity-Based Costing Success: A Research Framework Zhang Yi Fei and Che Ruhana Isa becoming more and more popular [3-7] ABC aims to provide accurate costing information to managers to allocate activity costs to products and services by applying cost drivers [8]. Academics who advocate ABC, such as, Cooper and Kaplan [9], and Swenson [10] argue that it provides more accurate cost data needed to make appropriate strategic decisions about product mix, sourcing, pricing, process improvement, and evaluation of business process performance. These claims have led many firms to adopt ABC systems [8]. The benefits of ABC and its positive impact on firm’s performance motivated a numerous studies which examined various aspects of ABC. Among such studies are McGowan [11] who assessed the integrity of ABC success, Innes and Mitchell [4, 12] and Yanren [13] who conducted research on factors affecting ABC adoption, and Shield [3], Shields and McEwen [14], Gosselin [15] and Baired et al.[16, 17]who concentrated on factors influencing ABC success especially at the implementation stage. However, there is mounting evidence that suggests most of firms are experiencing problems in implementing ABC and, in some extreme cases, ABC implementation is not successful [3], which later resulted in abandoning the ABC systems altogether [15]. Questions arise as to why ABC implementation is successful in certain companies and fails in others. Based on the contingency theory, researchers...
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...CHAPTER 5: ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING AND MANAGEMENT QUESTIONS 5-1 Product costs are likely distorted when a firm uses a volume-based rate if the plant has more than one activity in its operations and not all activities consume overhead in the same proportion. The more diverse the product mixes of the plant are in volume, sizes, manufacturing processes, or product complexities, the greater the cost distortions are likely to be in using a volume-based rate. Undercosting a product may appear to have increased the reported profit the product earned (assuming the firm did not lower its selling price because of the reported lower product cost). However, the increased profit is, at best, a twist in truth. Costs of the product not charged to the product itself are borne by other products of the firm. Worse, undercosting a product may result in managers erroneously believing the product to be more profitable than other products and shifting the limited resource the firm has into manufacturing, promotion, and sales of the product when, in fact, other products are more profitable to the firm. Severe cost distortions may lead firms not to drop unprofitable products because the cost data show these products are profitable. 5-3 Overcosting does not increase revenues. A firm can increase the selling price of a product, thereby increasing the total revenue from the product only if the market allows. Increases in the selling price of a product without experiencing noticeable decrease in the sales...
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...The decision makers should know the situation of the organization either by comparing competitors or previous periods’ performance in order to achieve the objectives of the company and this being possible by using accounting information. In addition, this thesis studies the importance of having effective and efficient accounting system to make better decision as it relates to increase the profitability target of an organization. Organizations should replace their weak accounting system in order to ensure that each team member in the Accounts Department is conscious of their role to produce good accounting information (1, Okoli Margaret). The result of this paper describes that providing right information to the right people in time via management reporting to maximize the use of reports in decision-making. 2 Introduction Any organization should survive and excel in the fast paced and ever changing market. We are living in the digital era so information can be found everywhere via websites, databases documents, reports, and emails. However, it’s important to read the historical data-set during decision making process but providing report in quick & timely manner, creating quality insight, different types of reports, and opportunities to learn from new data are basis to make better decision. As per Axson, information is the lifeblood of the modern corporation so decisions cannot be made without having information, customers cannot be served, and earnings cannot be grown. Refer...
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...[pic] Managerial Accounting BA3201 |Puganeswary Thirumalai Naidu |307254805 |BABHM | |Tan Lian Ping |11001200428010 |BABHM | |Yasmin Lim Binti Mohd.Arifin |307147803 |BBA MKT | |Herry Abubakar Mshihiri |609687502 |BBA IB | Question1 | |Task 1 : Sales and Labour Budgets : University | | | | | | | | | |1 (a) | | | | | ...
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... * Budgets: A budget is a quantitative expression of a plan. * Performance reports: These reports often consist of comparisons of budgets with actual results. The deviations of actual results from budget are called variances (Horngren and Foster, pp. 3) * Other information which assist managers in their planning and control activities. Examples are information on revenues of an organization’s products and services, sales back logs, unit quantities and demands on capacity resources (Kaplan and Atkinson, pp. 1). Managerial Accounting Practices around the World Traditional managerial accounting systems are mainly designed to measure the efficiency of internal processes. In the 1980’s, traditional managerial accounting practitioners were heavily criticized on the grounds that their practices had changed little over the preceding 60 years, despite radical changes in the business environment. The last decade’s new managerial accounting practices such as activity-based-costing, the balanced scorecard and bottleneck accounting were developed. Unlike traditional managerial accounting, activity-based-costing...
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