Activity based costing

In the debate between marginal decision-making and full absorbance that has been going on since the nineteenth century, activity-based costing/management (ABC/M) appeared as a promising decision support tool which answers the criticism leveled against traditional cost accounting. This paper describes the strengths and weaknesses of ABC/M from a global value creation perspective, in an effort to explain why it failed to live up to its promise and why not too many companies retained it beyond a short pilot period. The paper suggests the global decision-making methodology (GDM), as an effective alternative to costing methods, which improves the quality of decisions and enhances organization value. The paper illustrates its implementation by presenting a case study of a large international financial services organization that abandoned the ABC/M system it had been using for seven years in favor of GDM. The ABC/M system was transformed to a throughput focused "light ABC" system that supports GDM. The article describes the circumstances that led the organization to adopt GDM, and provides general guidelines for its implementation.

The objectives of this exploratory study are to develop a scale that best capture the perception of the practitioners related to activitybased (ABC) costing, and subsequently, develop a model that predicts the impact of perception of ABC on overall firm performance. The Cronbach's alpha shows apparent superiority of the scale. The factor analysis finds four dimensions, namely, overall performance, strategic cost allocation method, increased efficiency and increased effectiveness having the factor loadings of over ±0.3. The regression results are positive and significant at the 5% level. This study suggest that the developed scale can have significant implications to capture the perception of ABC and that the perception of ABC in terms of strategic cost allocation method, increased efficiency and increased effectiveness has significant effect on firms' performance.

Activity-based costing (ABC) and the theory of constraints (TOC) represent alternative paradigms for evaluating the economic consequences of production-related decisions. However, their application can lead to contradictory productmix decisions. To resolve this con#ict, it is frequently suggested that the TOC is appropriate for the short run, while ABC is appropriate for the longer term. This paper models the selection of a product mix with the TOC and an ABC model integrating activity-based cost with the capacity of production-related activities. The paper demonstrates that management's discretionary power over labor and overhead resources determines when the TOC and ABC lead to optimal product-mix decision. Equally important, it demonstrates that both the TOC and ABC may lead to a suboptimal product mix across a wide range of economic conditions. The paper develops a more general model of the product-mix decision and demonstrates that the TOC and ABC are special cases of this model. Finally, the paper discusses how the general model may be used to supplement information provided by the TOC and ABC.

This study provides theory and field evidence on the social process of hardening soft accounting information to make it persuasive for planning organizational change. Accounting information intended to support organizational change is often soft, that is, there is lack of interpersonal agreement about its quality. For example, employees can lack agreement about the quality of accounting information (e.g., activity-based costing) because the information is constructed from subjective information obtained from interviews and surveys. This information can contain unintentional errors as well as intentional distortions that are intended to avoid revealing embarrassing inefficiencies and/or to resist painful organizational change. We use concepts from applied game theory and social psychology to identify from the accounting literature four multi-person games that may be played to harden soft accounting information. These hardening games are characterized in terms of payoffs, players, the comparability of soft accounting information, and the rules of the games that are expected to emerge. We interpret the field evidence as indicating that the hardening games that emerge depend on who the players are and the comparability of their soft accounting information. In addition, we provide evidence on how the rules of the games that harden the information emerge from the players' social interactions. Finally, we provide evidence on how an organization learns by trial-and-error how to harden soft accounting information by changing the players and the comparability of the soft accounting information.

... Carola Raab, PhD (E-mail: raab@unlv.nevada.edu), Assistant Professor, Jean Hertzman, PhD, CCE (E-mail: jean.hertzman@unlv.edu), Assistant ... Finally, the analysis revealed five items as Stars (“Pork Osso Bucco”; “Mira Lago Paella”; “Chilean Sea Bass”; “Rib Eye Steak”; and ...

The objective of this publication is to translate the activities included in road  transport task into the language of tasks and to ascribe appropriate costs and  economic effectiveness indicators to them. Such a representation is new in literature and serves as the base for any further analysis of costs carried in an international  road cargo transport company. The suggested indicators refer to both direct and  indirect costs which are carried. They also allow to evaluate the work of people involved in the organization and realisation of transport tasks. Additionally, the  suggested cumulative indicators allow for the evaluation of transport tasks from the perspective of operational management of the company. The usage of the IT systems proved to be extremely helpful in this respect as they generate all the required information on the spot.

Presently there is a gross lack of information on cost and cost weights in many developing countries that implement casemix system. Furthermore, studies that employed Activity Based Costing method (ABC) to estimate the costs of radiology procedures were rarely done in developing countries, including Malaysia. The main objective of this study is to determine the costs of radiology procedures for each group in casemix system, in order to develop cost weights to be used in the implementation of the casemix system. An economic evaluation study was conducted in all units in the Department of Radiology in the first teaching hospital using the casemix system in Malaysia. From the 25,754 cases, 16,173 (62.8%) of them were from medical discipline. Low One Third and High One Third (L3H3) method was employed to trim the outlier cases. Output from the trimming, 15,387 cases were included in the study. The results revealed that the total inpatients' charges of all the radiology procedures was RM1,820,533.00 while the cost imputed using ABC method was RM2,970,505.54. The biggest cost component were human resources in Radiology Unit (Mobile) (57.5%), consumables (78.5%) of Endovascular Interventional Radiology (EIR) Unit, equipment (81.4%) of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Unit, reagents (68.1%) of Medical Nuclear Unit. The one highest radiology cost weight, was for Malaysia Diagnosis Related Group (MY-DRG ®) B-4-11-II (Hepatobiliary and Pancreas Neoplasms with severity level II, 2.8301). The method of calculation of the cost of procedures need to be revised by the hospital as findings from this study showed that the cost imposed to patient is lower than the actual cost.

Civil engineering projects include several uncertainties and risks, due to the special characteristics of construction industry. Time and cost are two parameters that could potentially lead to successful and conforming to regulations production of projects. It is imperative to estimate correctly the development and the final outcome of these parameters. Various tools have been applied in order to create more accurate estimations. In this paper, a prototype system will be presented, which aims at predicting the final cost, based on information available at the bidding stage. The methodology will be based on a combination of regression analysis and case-based reasoning in order to produce models for the prediction of final cost. These models will incorporate a process view and will depend on activity based costing methodology to estimate the process cost.

This paper examines the extent to which activity management practices are adopted by Australian public sector organizations at each of Gosselin's (1997) levels of Activity Analysis, Activity Cost Analysis, and Activity-based Costing. The present paper replicates Baird et al. (2004), thereby enabling a comparison of the extent of adoption of activity management in the public sector with that reported in the private sector in Baird et al. (2004). The results reveal that the adoption of higher level activity management practices (Activity Cost Analysis and Activity-based Costing) is less prevalent in public sector organizations, whereas they adopt Activity Analysis to the same extent as the private sector.

Research on Activity-Based Costing and its applications has mainly been focused on organisations in developed countries. Little has been learnt as to whether ABC techniques can be implemented successfully in organisations in developing countries. With the adoption of an innovation action research approach, we have successfully developed an ABC system jointly with a large Chinese manufacturing company, Xu Ji Electric Co. Ltd. (Xu Ji), for the period 2001-2005. The research provides a unique opportunity to examine some key success factors pertinent to ABC implementation within a Chinese organisational and cultural setting. The findings indicate that top management support, which has been identified as an important success factor in ABC literature, is evidently the predominant success factor in this organisation. In addition, Xu Ji's corporate culture of ''top-down'' instigation of the adoption of a series of management innovations (e.g., Economic-Value Added s , Balanced Scorecards and Six Sigma) and its hierarchical command and communication structure, coupled with active involvement of a high proportion of dedicated professionals, can be seen as another success factor in achieving a relatively high level of diffusion of this accounting concept within the organisation. This study also reveals a different insight of internal resistance to change, which is contrary to the evidence presented in the existing ABC literature.

This thesis tries to examine the underlying ABC theory and its applicability and practicability in the Hellenic Air Force. The assumption is that if ABC can provide a better management of HAF's resources costs, then HAF will have the opportunity to enhance its defence capabilities.

This paper reports a case study of implementing activity-based costing (ABC) in a Portuguese telecommunications firm. It proved problematic. Production engineers were reluctant to use ABC, being skeptical about its accuracy and usefulness. Workers resisted ABC by inputting inaccurate data late. Production managers tolerated this. Production personnel had difficulty understanding ABC, relating it to their jobs, and feared it would add to work intensification and redundancies. In contrast, commercial managers, responsible for pricing and investment, and senior managers were satisfied with ABC. They believed it was more accurate than previous systems, met the requirements of regulators and financial markets, and eased consolidation of accounts. They used ABC data for decisions despite its problems. The results were consistent with factor and process-based research on ABC implementation. For example, top management support and generous resources help explain why the project was evaluated favourably outside of production. User involvement and ownership of the project was high but the prioritisation of commercial over production needs, and education and training delays fuelled conflicts between commercial and production managers. Given inter-professional rivalries and production managers' token commitment to implementing ABC it is questionable whether ABC could ever have been effective within production. The case confirms that evaluations of

The use of activity-based costing (ABC) has been steadily, if not rapidly, spreading on an international level. This fact notwithstanding, the economic benefit associated with adopting ABC is suspect, at best. In an effort to shed additional light on this apparent dilemma, this paper empirically investigates the stock market effects of announcing the adoption of an ABC system. The research methodology includes both parametric and non-parametric tests for excess market returns from a seemingly unrelated regressions model with a matched pairs sample of firms. The analysis indicates that the installation of an ABC system in the United States is not associated with a significant (either positive or negative) stock market reaction.

In today's competitive marketplace, quality professionals should use the latest tools to provide them information necessary to make informed business decisions and avoid costly inefficiencies such as rework and scrap. To effectively plan and budget for quality, an activity-based approach provides a baseline/benchmark of the true costs of operating an efficient and value-added quality organization. Activity based costing/activity based management (ABC/M) and activity based budgeting (ABB) holds great promise as a common sense solution to the faults and frustrations of traditional accounting/budgeting methods. Traditional budgets do not identify waste, ABB exposes non-value costs. Traditional budgets focus on workers while ABB focuses on the workload. Traditional budgets focus on departmental cost, ABB also focuses on process cost. Traditional budgets focus on fixed versus variable costs while ABB also focuses on used versus unused capacity and traditional budgets measure "effect" while ABB assists the quality professional in defining "true cause."

This study describes a framework to support the choice of the maintenance service (in-house or third party contract) for each category of medical equipment based on: a) the real medical equipment maintenance management system currently used by the biomedical engineering group of the public health system of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas located in Brazil to control the medical equipment maintenance service, b) the Activity Based Costing (ABC) method, and c) the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. Results show the cost and performance related to each type of maintenance service. Decision-makers can use these results to evaluate possible strategies for the categories of equipment.

This study deals with management accounting practices in small and medium sized service firms in Finland. The recent trends of Management Accounting Systems (MAS), such as Activity Based Costing (ABC), are not frequently used in Finnish service organizations, although these practices have been realized by the majority of respondents to be an important tool to understand real product costs, decrease production costs, modernize cost accounting systems and identify activity costs. An empirical study indicates that a few Finnish small and medium sized service organizations have implemented recent developments of MAS such as ABC. The practices of MAS do not vary with differences in type of service firms that were included in this study. This paper demonstrates that MAS are not very successful in the Finnish service organizations investigated to achieve the goal of decision making, planning and management control, and to improve the information system within the organizations.

We report the results of a nine-year Weld study that examines how responsibility accounting (RA) is used to manage horizontal relationships among several responsibility center (RC) managers including those who work on committees or cross-functional teams. We Wnd theory-consistent evidence that the goal-congruent design or redesign of accounting and participation practices in general, and of RA in particular, depends on the magnitude, scope, and speed of organizational process change. When there is a change in the magnitude, scope, and speed of organizational process change, we Wnd that the measurability of RC managers' Wnancial performance can change, and we also Wnd that using RA to manage RC boundaries is an important mechanism for achieving goal-congruent behavior and avoiding dysfunctional behavior. Moreover, we show that several accounting and participation practices (e.g., activity-based costing, open book accounting, project budgeting, cross-functional teams) support RC boundary management that involves framing or reframing RC boundaries so as to inXuence competitive or cooperative behavior among RC managers. Finally, this study contributes by introducing a new research method to the accounting literature that is eVective in structuring and interpreting longitudinal Weld data in relation to theoretical expectations.

Activity-Based Costing (ABC) has been successfully applied in the manufacturing industry for the last two decades. In this study, a workable ABC model for restaurants was created and tested in a restaurant operation in a western urban area of the United States. The study identified that the actual cost of the dinner entrees was higher than the restaurant's prices, when

Capacity planning or capacity management is the process of determining the production needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products and services. For a casino and integrated resort, its products and services include casino gambling games, hotel rooms, seats in its restaurants and bars, tickets for its theaters, music concerts, and other live events, admissions to its amusement parks and rides, as well as any purchases made on its property.
IT capacity planning involves estimating the storage, computer hardware, software and connection infrastructure resources required over some future period of time. A common concern of enterprises is whether the required resources are in place to handle an increase in users or number of interactions. Capacity management is concerned with adding CPUs, memory and storage to a physical or virtual server. This has been the traditional and vertical way of scaling up web applications, however IT capacity planning has been developed with the goal of forecasting the requirements for this vertical scaling approach. In the context of capacity planning, design capacity is the maximum amount of work that an organization is capable of completing in a given period.

and watch. During the top) service has seen an exponential a growing activity and on this field. In past few Paper, human emotions to provide dynamic content recommen deep list of movies overcome problem in existing method. Keywords When television first came player emerge in the market. with the introduction of the Netflix, Amazon Prime and many other OTT(Over the top) media around provides the has changed the way users interact with video content. films and human emotions. Emotions neurophysiologic pleasure or displeasure. The recent advancement in machine learning, Computer vision and recommendation has achieved studies on computer vision, there is a possibility of improving the quality of Recommendation System whose primary goal is to predict predictions we decide whether to learning have become very popular target their content to a specific audience. they can d The motivation in this work to use emotion technique in recommendation system to generate additional input movie recommendation system a system,

The Internet of things is a platform, which connects and controls the real word objects through a wireless network. This paper presents a novel approach to collect the data from the sensors, which resides on a Mechatronic devices. Using communication protocols these devices are integrated with the cloud based IoT data logger. There will be a communication between the data logger and the server. Android based application developed will monitor the action of devices.

This article examines and proposes the implementation of best practice cost reduction strategies capable of enhancing profitability. Multichoice Nigeria limited (MCN) was the organization under focus, and the study population comprises 617 staff of Multichoice Pay TV in Lagos Metropolis. Simple random sampling technique was used to draw fifty respondents from the population space. Structured questionnaires were used as instrument of data collection while frequency distribution, chart, and

This case study provides a thorough training and/or examination of students' basic costing skills linked to pricing and touching some behavioural aspects of management accounting as well. The case study is divided into three specific areas and concerns of the organization enabling both interrelations between the three subsections but also isolation in the use of the subsections. The subsections provide each their theme to the case. The case study is, thus, applicable both as an exam and as a case study for class exercises. It provides quite specific elements of cost allocation and allows for further reflection of the various areas of a small international organization's coordination and management challenges. The issues are aimed at management accounting students but may be beneficial for all types of business students. The case study enables students to demonstrate their comprehensive costing skills and understanding within an international business. Likewise, used as class exercises, it will prepare students for an exam situation and should enhance an understanding of costing behaviour.

This article describes the application of activity-based costing (ABC) to calculate the unit costs of the services for a health care provider in Peru. While traditional costing allocates overhead and indirect costs in proportion to production volume or to direct costs, ABC assigns costs through activities within an organization. ABC uses personnel interviews to determine principal activities and the distribution of individual's time among these activities. Indirect costs are linked to services through time allocation and other tracing methods, and the result is a more accurate estimate of unit costs.

Cost engineering is a scientific technique to improve the value of analysing specific features. Value as described is the ratio of feature to value. Cost engineering is the systematic utility of characteristic-oriented techniques by means of a multi-disciplined crew to analyse and enhance the cost of a product, procedure or service. fee engineering is considered as a tool of production management which could help to improve the strategies, services and very last merchandise regarding the wishes, with appreciate to time, value and pleasant. The v.e. technique has evolved from previous strategies primarily based on the idea of value and useful approach. Cost engineering is a technique used to investigate the feature of the goods and offerings and to gain the required features of the consumer at the bottom total value without reducing the important quality of performance. Production cost modelling (c.c.m.) is a beneficial device in which the fee is disproportionately excessive whilst considering their function, use, necessity. production fee modelling is an improve elaborate method for price engineering in construction management, where it is able to cause a considerable of huge and complex production whose fee are excessively excessive whilst considering their function, use or necessity, are highest as ideal topics for value reduction efforts. the supplied paper has a look at pursuits to make clear the idea of fee control in construction industry, thru literature review, and references and books using fee engineering in global level and to provide a short description of the worldwide realize.

The purpose of this paper is to examine why and how a Central Bank of a South Asian Country (CBSAC), the monetary authority and the regulatory body of finance and banking sector, adopts and implements Activity Based Costing (ABC) practices. The primary data were collected by conducting semi structured interviews and observing organizational processes. Secondary data were collected through reviewing various documents such as guidelines to activity wise time recording sheets, annual reports and online sources including the CBSAC web site and CBSAC intranet. In the data collection process, higher emphasis was placed on data triangulation. Data analysis was carried out following an explanation building approach. The study identified that the appointment of the new Governor in 2006 was the major driver for moving towards ABC method at the CBSAC. Currently through time recording sheets, activity wise cost of each department is being tracked and assigned to the CBSAC functions. The CBSAC has taken several initiatives to improve the ABC system which has propelled it towards a more time driven ABC.

Publikacija Procesni pristup obračunu troškova u sustavu zdravstva rezultat je empirijskog istraživanja na projektu „Poslovni procesi u implementaciji obračuna troškova u sustavu zdravstva“ financiranog od strane Sveučilišta u Zagrebu iz namjenskih sredstava Potpora znanstvenom i umjetničkom istraživanju za 2015. godinu te empirijskog istraživanja internih dokumenata Kliničkog bolničkog centra Zagreb (KBC Zagreb) koje se provodi od 2014. godine u okviru projekta br. 8509 „Accounting and financial reporting reform as a means for strengthening the development of efficient public sector financial management in Croatia“ financiranog od strane Hrvatske zaklade za znanost. Publikacija je namijenjena znanstvenoj i široj stručnoj kao i ostaloj zainteresiranoj javnosti kako bi se približila tema obračuna troškova u sustavu zdravstva i povećala informiranost i svjesnost o potrebi praćenja i upravljanja troškovima u javnim bolnicama te izračunu cijene koštanja zdravstvenih usluga. Publikacija ovakvog sadržaja nije do sada bila dostupna na hrvatskom jeziku te će njezino objavljivanje pomoći svim zainteresiranima u upoznavanju s metodologijom računovodstva troškova, ali i njegovim specifičnostima u sustavu javnog zdravstva. Publikacija je strukturirana logičnim slijedom koji polazi od obilježja javnog zdravstvenog sustava u Republici Hrvatskoj u kojem se ukratko opisuje zakonski okvir sustava zdravstva, financiranje javnog zdravstva te okvir računovodstva i financijskog izvještavanja koji se primjenjuje u javnom zdravstvenom sustavu. Naglasak je na potrebi razumijevanja i povezivanja načina i modela financiranja zdravstva i njemu primjerenog računovodstvenog i izvještajnog okvira namijenjenog eksternom izvještavanju s računovodstvenim i izvještajnim okvirom namijenjenom internom izvještavanju i usmjerenom donošenju upravljačkih odluka u zdravstvenim ustanovama. U sljedećih šest poglavlja publikacije prezentirani su različiti pristupi obračunu troškova u sustavu zdravstva i primjeri primjene temeljeni na studijama slučaja domaćih i inozemnih autora. Drugo poglavlje publikacije prikazuje obilježja tradicionalne metode obračuna troškova i daje primjere primjene u pojedinim zdravstvenim ustanovama. Treće poglavlje sadrži teoretski prikaz razvoja metode obračuna troškova po aktivnostima (ABC metode) u sustavu zdravstva i navodi uspješne primjere u implementaciji s uočenim koristima za ustanove koje su ju implementirale. Četvrto poglavlje publikacije daje prikaz razvoja nove metode primjenjive u sustavu zdravstva koja je izvedenica iz metode obračuna troškova po aktivnostima i zasnovana je na vremenu utrošenom u pružanju zdravstvenih usluga. Peto, šesto i sedmo poglavlje prikazuje studije slučaja koje se aplikativno bave primjenom metoda obračuna troškova u zdravstvenim ustanovama. Prezentirano je istraživanje kroz studije slučaja Italije gdje su prikazana tri različita odjela Sveučilišne bolnice u Trstu s primijenjenom metodologijom obračuna troškova po aktivnostima zasnovane na vremenu utrošenom u pružanju zdravstvenih usluga svakog odjela. Također je prezentirano računovodstveno praćenje pružanja zdravstvene usluge na razini doma zdravlja u Bosni i Hercegovini u području primarne zdravstvene zaštite pri čemu se prikazuje proces pružanja zdravstvene usluge i pripadajući troškovi primjenom obračuna troškova po aktivnostima (ABC metoda) i obračuna troškova po aktivnostima zasnovane na vremenu utrošenom u pružanju zdravstvenih usluga (TDABC metode) te prikazuje razlika između navedenih metoda. U sedmom poglavlju prikazan je model obračuna troškova na Klinici X Kliničkog bolničkog centra Zagreb (KBC Zagreb). Prikazani model je kombinacija tradicionalnog pristupa alokacije troškova, obračuna troškova po aktivnostima (ABC metoda) i obračuna troškova po aktivnostima zasnovanim na vremenu utrošenom u pružanju zdravstvenih usluga (TDABC metode). Pri izradi modela u procesu intervjuiranja napravljena je snimka poslovnih procesa kao podloga izradi modela koji odražava mogućnost obračuna troškova uvjetovanu specifičnostima poslovanja i postojećeg načina praćenja te evidencije troškova KBC-a Zagreb.

This paper reviews the results of two U.K. surveys of activity-based costing (ABC) in the U.K.'s largest companies. These provide an opportunity to assess the changes that have occurred in the ABC adoption status of companies over a recent 5-year period. For the ABC users, some comparative information is provided on the nature of the ABC systems in use, their designers, the uses to which they have been put and the levels of success and importance that participants attribute to them. For the non-users, the reasons for their lack of commitment to ABC are explored.

In this paper we propose an Activity Based Costing approach for vendor selection and evaluation. This system allows us to compute total costs caused by a supplier in a firm's production process, thereby increasing the objectivity in the selection process. We further show that for vendor evaluation purposes the difference between the budgeted and actual total vendor score can be decomposed in a purchaser effect, a supplier effect and a combined effect. We illustrate the Activity Based Costing approach with a case study.

This paper presents an improved, efficiency based absorption costing method. Efficiency based absorption costing EBAC represent an algorithm that absorbs costs based on efficiency as the main driver and we compare its results with other methods such as ABC as proof-of-concept. EBAC results in significant cost changes compared to ABC and the traditional costing system (TCS). Businesses could embrace the more efficient EBAC for a host of their pertinent cost control and decision making needs. The EBAC methodology is both easy and convenient to apply as firms currently using ABC could instantly explore EBAC without the need to gather extra information. al. 2006) and retail . Although ABC was hailed as being able to allocate overheads to products more accurately, provide better pricing decisions and better resource allocations ) one of the key weaknesses of ABC and TCS is the use of the "blanket overhead absorption rate" to allocate costs. To understand this phenomenon, it is important to explore the evolution of the TCS and ABC in more detail.

With the urban and industrial growth, many evolving countries suffer from excessive air pollution. The growing concern about air pollution has been raised by the government and people because it affects individual's health and sustainable development globa interpose and forecast air pollution for the whole city. for air quality forecasting based on 1D CNN, Bi the PM2.5 dataset taken from UCI Machine Learning Repository. traditional deep learning models,

Using institutional theory to interpret the role of management accounting in organizational change, the paper reports on a longitudinal empirical study of the implementation of an Activity-Based Costing (ABC) system in the Clearing Department of a UK-based multinational bank. Since the ABC project team was operating at the same time as other change agents (productivity consultants and human resource engineering), their interrelationships are explored through the displacement/establishment of routines and institutionalized practices. The extent and nature of organizational change is evaluated by drawing on the dichotomies of formal versus informal change, revolutionary versus evolutionary change, and regressive versus progressive change (Burns and Scapens, 2000). Tensions were identified between the need to establish ABC as an organizational routine thereby ensuring its reproduction with the less routinized but more revolutionary aspirations of ABM. The ABC team succeeded in institutionalizing a less radical version of ABC that revealed new links between costs and products, but did not go as far as to transform the strategic thinking of the bank's senior management.

This ®eld study seeks to illustrate how an organisation's accounting system can be changed by a heterogeneous actor-network of local and global actors and actants. In particular, it focusses on the role of boundary that were able to stabilise and mediate diverse interests. Five types of boundary objects were identi®ed Ð data repositories, visionary objects ideal type objects, coincident boundaries and standardized protocols. Here, accounting change was antiheroic Ð the eort of many as opposed to a powerful few had to be corralled. Also, change was cyclical, as new accounting technologies were adopted on faith, made to`work/succeed' temporarily, and then abandoned. #

Activity-based costing and management are now the stock-in-trade of a lucrative industry, with at least one Big Six consultancy operation devoted wholly to their promotion. Both techniques represent a major extension of accountability in the modern corporation, into a zone previously defined in accounting terms as fixed overhead. The mechanics depend on treating the staff department as a mass-producer of repeated acts of routine service ('activities') performed 'for' particular cost-objects, usually products. By treating these activities as performance indicators, payroll budgets can be linked to activity volumes thus creating pressures for the casualisation of staff employment. The activity frame of reference, particularly when linked with 'value analysis', also encourages the stripping-out of all staff work which cannot be accommodated within its definition of activities. This threatens a dumbing-down of staff departments in which nonroutine initiatives aimed at competitive advantage in fields such as human resource management or marketing may be stifled because they cannot be accommodated within the language of accountability imposed by ABM.

Purpose -To investigate the potential of combining six sigma (SS) and theory of constraints (TOC) to improve production system performance. Design/methodology/approach -Based on the literature, this paper proposes an integrated TOC/SS framework and applies this framework to an axle manufacturing company to improve its gear-cutting operation. Findings -The results of the case study indicate that the company benefited tremendously from its emphasis on global improvement guided by the TOC concept. Managers were able to select a continuous improvement (CI) project that had greater impact on bottom line performance. On the other hand, SS provided various statistical tools and engineering techniques (such as value analysis, Pareto diagram and control charts) for defining the specific process to be improved, analyzing the root causes, and designing actions for making improvement.

Günümüz piyasa ekonomisindeki rekabetçilik sürekli ilerlemekte ve buna bağlı olarak da bu rekabetçi anlayışın yanında piyasada var olmanın temel prensipleri de sürekli değişmektedir. Özellikle de üretim teknolojisinde yaşanan hızlı gelişmeler, firmaları yüksek kaliteli ancak düşük maliyetli ürünler üretmeye itmektedir. Geleneksel maliyet muhasebesinin eksik kaldığı ve ürün maliyetlerinin hesaplanmasında önemli bir noktaya gelinen günümüz ekonomik piyasasında geleneksel maliyet muhasebesi terk edilmeye başlanmış ve buna bağlı olarak da faaliyet tabanlı maliyet esaslı sisteme geçiş süreci yaşanmaktadır.
Bu çalışmada faaliyet tabanlı maliyetleme sistemi izah edilmeye çalışılmış; geleneksel maliyet muhasebesinden ayrılan yönleri ile işletmelere getirdiği faydalardan bahsedilmiştir. Faaliyet tabanlı maliyetlemenin gerekliliği ve sisteme getirdiği yeniliklerden bahsedilerek bu yeniliklerin süreçlerine de ayrıca değinilmiştir.

The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence about the effect of costing technique used by companies on the cost performance of new product development initiatives in industrial companies in Europe. A survey was carried out collecting response from 204 companies in the different consumer product industries to investigate the comparative effect of those two popular techniques. Statistical analyses revealed significant relationship with both ABC and TOC but with a much stronger effect of ABC on the NPD cost performance.

With dynamic business environment, global competition and continuously improving technology, the importance of performance measurement and cost management in an organization has attained new heights. Activity Based Costing (ABC) and Balanced Scorecard (BSC) are the two modern management accounting techniques capable of providing more accurate cost information at various activity levels of an organization and
monitoring the enterprise’s performance respectively. This paper deals with the implementation of an ABC model in a biscuit manufacturing organization in India. The results elicited from the adopted ABC model would help the policy makers of the said organization in taking different managerial decisions, like estimating the selling price, determining the profitability of products and devising better product mix for the market. A BSC model is separately adopted to facilitate a balanced view of the organizational performance

Activity-based costing provides a more accurate method of product/service costing, leading to more accurate pricing decisions. It increases understanding of overheads and cost drivers; and makes costly and non-value adding activities more visible, allowing managers to reduce or eliminate them. ABC enables effective challenge of operating costs to find better ways of allocating and eliminating overheads. It also enables improved product and customer profitability analysis. It supports performance management techniques such as continuous improvement and scorecards. It is because; the company should implement ABC rather than traditional costing system.

The case study was carried out in the field of Management Accounting and Performance Evaluation at the University of Derby, United Kingdom. The purpose of the case study is to critically evaluate the implications of retaining the standard costing system at the female sportswear manufacturing company Active Sports Life (ASL) and to make relevant recommendations. The paper shows that management accounting processes have to follow company strategy in a given business environment. A combination of management accounting instruments can prove successful to save on costs, to retain valuable goods and services and to remain competitive through appropriate pricing.

Activity Based Costing (ABC) methods and models have been presented in the literature as sophisticated approaches for cost management and costing purposes. Kaplan and Norton’s Time-Driven Activity Based Costing (TDABC) represented an update or improvement of the initial ABC models proposed by Cooper and Kaplan. The relevance and applicability of the TDABC approach is still an open question. The purpose of this paper is to discuss TDABC from a critical analysis of the literature, checking and comparing methodologies and research techniques, as well as contributions to mitigate difficulties encountered in the implementation of the model. As a result, it is established a relation between ABC and TDABC approaches and an integrated TDABC-ABC model and methodology is proposed. Some ideas for future work and management implications are also discussed.

This article uses a survey to identify the extent to which Australian manufacturing firms have adopted certain traditional and recently developed management accounting practices, the benefits received from those practices and the intentions to emphasize certain management accounting practices in the future. The findings indicate that, overall, the rates of adoption of traditional management accounting practices were higher than recently developed techniques. However, newer techniques, such as activity-based costing, were more widely adopted than found in prior surveys. Also, the benefits obtained from traditional management accounting techniques were higher than those of newer techniques. The evidence suggests that the majority of large Australian firms have adopted a range of management accounting techniques that emphasize non-financial information, and take a more strategic focus.

Food processing sector has vital importance in developing a country’s economy that is primarily driven by agriculture sector, like India. It provides significant linkages and synergies between two important aspects of economy, i.e. industry and agriculture. Activity based costing (ABC) is a modern management tool that analyzes cost of a product or service at various activity levels and provides more accurate cost information, thus helping the decision makers to devise various strategies to efficiently utilize an organization’s resources, activities and people. This paper deals with the application of an ABC model in a pulse mill in India to
quantify cost of its various products. Although, there are limited published research papers related to implementation of ABC models in agriculture sector, but till date, ABC has not been applied in any food processing organization of India. The results derived from the adopted ABC model in the pulse mill provide more detailed and precise cost information that facilitate various managerial decisions, like setting of selling price, ascertaining profitability of products, taking a make  or buy decision etc.

THE POPULARITY OF ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING (ABC) GREW RAPIDLY DURING THE 1990S, AND, IN THE FOLLOWING DECADE, MANY SURVEYS REPORTED USAGE RATES OF ABOUT 50%. OVER THE PAST 10  YEARS, HOWEVER, THERE HAS BEEN DEBATE ABOUT THE OVERALL RELEVANCE OF THIS COSTING METHOD. TO INVESTIGATE THE CURRENT IMPORTANCE
OF ABC, WE SURVEYED 348 MANUFACTURING AND SERVICE COMPANIES WORLDWIDE. OUR RESULTS INDICATE THAT ABC CONTINUES TO OFFER  ORGANIZATIONS SIGNIFICANT VALUE FROM STRATEGIC AND OPERATIONAL PERSPECTIVES.

Construction projects become complicated and fragmented so that many specialty contractors are involved. In such changed environments, a general contractor's overhead costs are increasing comparable to direct costs. In addition to an increase of volume, activities consisting of overhead costs play an important role in coordinating different participants who include different specialty contractors and client.

The process of deriving written descriptions from a picture based on the items and behaviours portrayed is known as image caption generation. The resulting description will represent what is in the image and the interactions among the objects. However, like with any other image processing challenge, recreating this characteristic in an artificial system is a difficult feat, and so the adoption Deep Learning procedures can help to tackle the problem. The main goal of this project is to generate an image captioning model that can provide a concise and relatable description of the picture by incorporating an attention mechanism. Ideally, the model can be separated into two components-one is called Encoder and the other is a Decoder. The encoder used here is a Google InceptionV3 pre-trained model. And the decoder is a language-based model, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to translate the characteristics and objects provided by the encoder into natural sentences. Furthermore, the model's effectiveness is aided by the attention mechanism. To conclude, the model is trained on a subset of the MS COCO dataset, which contains about 80,000 pictures with at least five descriptions each and evaluated based on the BLEU score. To reduce the loss, the model weights are tuned using the categorical cross-entropy loss function. The results of the model are promising and competitive.

BACKGROUND: Blood utilization has long been suspected to consume more health care resources than previously reported. Incomplete accounting for blood costs has the potential to misdirect programmatic decision making by health care systems. Determining the cost of supplying patients with blood transfusions requires an in-depth examination of the complex array of activities surrounding the decision to transfuse. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: To accurately determine the cost of blood in a surgical population from a health system perspective, an activity-based costing (ABC) model was constructed. Tasks and resource consumption (materials, labor, third-party services, capital) related to blood administration were identified prospectively at two US and two European hospitals. Process frequency (i.e., usage) data were captured retrospectively from each hospital and used to populate the ABC model. RESULTS: All major process steps, staff, and consumables to provide red blood cell (RBC) transfusions to surgical patients, including usage frequencies, and direct and indirect overhead costs contributed to per-RBC-unit costs between $522 and $1183 (mean, $761 Ϯ $294). These exceed previously reported estimates and were 3.2-to 4.8-fold higher than blood product acquisition costs. Annual expenditures on blood and transfusion-related activities, limited to surgical patients, ranged from $1.62 to $6.03 million per hospital and were largely related to the transfusion rate. CONCLUSION: Applicable to various hospital practices, the ABC model confirms that blood costs have been underestimated and that they are geographically variable and identifies opportunities for cost containment. Studies to determine whether more stringent control of blood utilization improves health care utilization and quality, and further reduces costs, are warranted.