|
Abstract:
|
The major reasons for not implementing activity-based costing (ABC) are said to be the high costs of creating a really accurate system and the huge number of detailed information that needs to be managed. Therefore, significant problems in ABC models seem to be the usability and maintainability of the information; cost information should be generated rapidly and it should also be easy to access. In companies that have numerous products the assignment of activities certainly requires great effort, but it still is not an obstacle for a successful ABC implementation with reasonable costs.- The aim of the study was to present a new idea for combining product portfolio management and activity-based costing and to analyze the applicability of the solution idea. In this study, a method for assigning activities to cost objects utilizing a product portfolio is introduced. The product portfolio steers resource use, which means that different product classes use different resources or different amounts of the same resource. Activity-based costing, on the other hand, is concerned with the resource consumption of different cost objects. Because of the common interest in modeling resource use, these two management tools come together somewhat naturally. Furthermore, the product portfolio links the resources and activity use to product classes, which is exactly the information needed for activity assignment. /Kir10 |