A Case Study of Activity Based Costing

The week four individual paper addresses the implementation of Activity Based Costing (ABC) by Super Bakery, Inc., a virtual corporation founded by Franco Harris. Specifically, management strategies, the reasoning behind an ABC system, and the alternatives of a job order cost system or a process order cost system are assessed for this enterprise.

Activity-based costing can be defined as the managers allocate costs depending on the quantity of resources a product or service consumed in the manufacture of goods and services. The activity based

The week four individual paper addresses the implementation of Activity Based Costing (ABC) by Super Bakery, Inc., a virtual corporation founded by Franco Harris. Specifically, management strategies, the reasoning behind an ABC system, and the alternatives of a job order cost system or a process order cost system are assessed for this enterprise.

In 1995 the Australian Society of CPAs initiated a major survey on ABC amongst Australian manufacturers. This survey, which was conducted by the University of Technology, Sydney, involved 213 firms covering all aspects of Australian manufacturing (Corrigan, 1996; Wood, 1996). This survey showed that 45 per cent of the surveyed firms had never considered adopting ABC (although 88 per cent of those surveyed acknowledged awareness of activity-based costing), 29 per cent were still in the process of considering adopting it, 14 per cent had considered and rejected it and only 12 per cent of the firms surveyed had actually implemented it. The highest adoption rates of ABC were found amongst the food, beverage and tobacco industry with 25 per cent of this group using this method.

Activity-based costing is a system of accounting that puts emphases on activities performed to produce products or services (Schneider, 2012). In this costing system every activity is assigned a cost (Schneider, 2012). The goal of activity-based costing is not to allot common costs to products but to measure and then price out all the resources used for activities that sustain the production and delivery of products and services to customers (Mazumder, 2007). Activity-based costing is a cost system that is useful in business because of the fact that it does account for the cost of the products, resources used to produce the product and delivery of the product.

Under an ABC system, the allocation of costs to products is achieved through at least four analytical steps. Firstly, costs are grouped into activity levels. Secondly, cost drivers are

This paper provides a brief presentation of Activity-Based Costing methodology, how is used as well as its short comings.

One of the best aspects of the way the time-driven ABC system was put into place at Kemps was how efficiently and accurately management determined the main issues with the current cost system and responded with appropriate and relevant solutions. For example, one of the greatest problems the company was facing was that many of its operating costs were spread out equally over a customer base that was growing more diverse and demanding more personalized and varied service, effectively cutting or potentially eliminating entirely Kemps’ profit margins for a product. Therefore,

The cost analysis framework is a useful method of engaging policy developers during the development process of policy interventions. In this case, following the identification of the room for improvement in PACU, several policy interventions could be adopted to improve the quality of patient care delivered in the unit. Cost analysis is a suitable tool for such situations. It helps policy makers to compare the benefits of different potential projects which could be integrated into the system, to their costs, thus enhancing their choice of the most efficacious option. Specifically, the cost analysis will enable the policy makers to identify the possible approaches which could be used to achieve the stated objectives of the project, which, based

An organization costing system is a system that helps the management with the strategy planning while the system plays an important role in providing accurate cost information about the products and customers (Curtin, 2006). UPS utilizes the Activity-Based Costing (ABC) system. ABC assumes that activities cause costs and that cost objects create the demand for activities (Marx,

This paper will discuss and analyze the concepts of Activity- Based Costing (ABC) in the manufacturing industry. Specifically, the document will focus on General Motors (GM), and the innovation of one of their manufacturing facilities who used ABC to predict energy usage in the manufacturing of automobiles. The study yielded a successful ABC predictive energy model which provided a structure for competitive advantage for the corporation.

Nowadays, we know that activity based costing system assigns overhead costs to products or services products that using a two-stage process, which focuses on activities. ABC is a relatively new and very important topic in managerial accounting. ABC allows us to find a way that we could determine the profitability of every product, profitability of every customer we serve, and the profitability of our process. Contents in brief, first that comparing potential advantages of ABC versus traditional costing methods. The

1. Identify the flaws associated with the current method of assigning shipping and warehousing costs to Sharp’s products.

C. T. Horngren, A. Bhimani, S. M. Datar, G. Foster (2005), 'Activity-Based Costing', Management and Cost Accounting (Prentice Hall Europe), 345-363

During the 1980s the limitations of traditional product costing systems began to be widely publicised. These systems were designed decades ago when most companies manufactured a narrow range of products, and direct labour and materials were the dominant factory costs. Overhead costs were relatively small, and the distortions arising from inappropriate overhead allocations were not significant. Information processing costs were high, and it was therefore difficult to justify more sophisticated overhead allocation methods.