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ABC System Used by United Parcel Service (UPS) Essay

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United Parcel Service (UPS) was founded in 1907 as a messenger company. It has grown into a multi-billion dollar corporation. Today UPS is a global company and one of the most admired and recognized brands in the world. UPS has become the largest delivery package company and leading provider of specialized transportation and logistics services in the world.
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, …show more content…

Data must be collected, verified and entered into the system. ABC does not conform to GAAP so a company will need two accounting books, one for internal and one for external. The data can be very easily misinterpreted, decision making entails identifying which costing data is relevant for decisions on hand.
UPS system is based on traditional ABC in that it takes detailed functional cost and maps it to the products based on the activities that the products drive (ups.com). UPS is a cross functional discipline, in that it identifies activities within a function or process, measures the cost associated with the activity and then assigns the cost to a product. UPS responded to technology, the market and changing times by developing new business strategies to focus on customer needs. The new change in the business environment demands the organizations to gather the relevant data and information about the customers, costs, procedures, services, products and activities (Danish, Hasan & Abid, 2013). They needed a better understanding of specific segments of their business. UPS operations are extremely complex with a wide variety of service options, operating conditions and support activities (ups.com). UPS’s ABC system is unique in that it leverages our database of work measurement and package movement detail

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