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Activity Based Costing Management

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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, process improvement and re-engineering, benchmarking, performance measurement and a variety of related exercises including activity or priority based budgeting. Activity based costing forces the manager to investigate fixed costs very closely. It therefore helps management to identify areas of inefficiency as well as recognize costs which you may have believed were fixed, but were

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