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Activity-Based Strategic and Profitability Measurement Systems

Virtually all manufacturing companies use their inventory valuation
systems to measure product costs. As discussed earlier, this system,
in today's environment of large indirect expenses and product diversity,
produces highly distorted product costs. Service companies, who
have not had to assign expenses to their products for financial statement
purposes, have operated for decades without knowing product
costs. They collected costs in functional or responsibility categories
but made little effort to assign accurately their operating expenses to
their products and customers.

At its simplest level, product cost distortions occur in virtually all
organizations producing and selling multiple products. An example
provides a simple illustration of the sources of the distortion. Consider
two factories, both making pens using identical capital equipment and
physical facilities. Plant I is a focused producer that manufactures
only blue pens, 1.000.000 units per year. Plant I1 is a full line producer.
In addition to producing blue pens, (100.000 per year), it produces
a variety of other colors : 100.000 black, 50.000 red, 20.000 green and
so on. Plant I1 also produces a wide variety of specialty colors (such
as 800 purple pens per year), plus pens that write on a variety of surfaces
(flip charts, transparencies, white boards, etc.). All together,
Plant 11, like Plant I, produces 1.000.000 pens per year, but with several
thousand different color, packaging, and writing surface combinations.

Despite the similarity in product, physical facilities, and total output
of the two plants, a visitor walking through them would notice
dramatic differences. Plant I1 contains many more people : to schedule
machines, perform setups, inspect output after each setup, to
schedule, receive and inspect incoming materials and packages, to
move, count and value inventory, expedite orders, rework defective
materials, design and implement engineering change orders, negotiate
with vendors, issue purchase orders, and update and program
the much larger computer-based information system. Plant I1 also
operates with much higher levels of idle time, overtime, inventory,
rework, and scrap.

Any traditional cost system will assign about 10% of Plant 11's overhead
cost to blue pens. Whether indirect costs are assigned based on
direct labor-hours, machine-hours, material quantities, or units produced,
blue pens represent 10% of the plant's volume of activity and
will, therefore, receive 10% of the plant's indirect costs. Similarly, a
low volume product such as the 800 purple pens produced each year
would have .08% (800 divided by 1.000.000) of the plant's indirect
costs assigned to it. If a blue and a purple pen had the same labor
times, machine processing times, and direct material costs, then the
standard cost of the two products would be identical under any traditional
cost system.

The strategic consequences from using such a cost system can be
disastrous. Over time, the market price for blue pens, and for most
high-volume standard products, will be determined by focused and efficient
producers like Plant I. Managers of Plant I1 will find it difficult
to compete in the blue pen market because their reported profit margins
in these lines will be low or even negative. The managers of Plant
I1 will look for profit growth in their new product lines - designer colors,
specialized writing surfaces - where they earn attractive price
premiums, perhaps 10 to 20 percent. They will de-emphasize standard
commodity-like products where the plant seems uncompetitive, and
shift to an expanded line of specialty products with unique features
and options, and generally much smaller unit volumes. Of course, scaling
back on blue pens and proliferating the product line to replace
the lost volumes will create new demands for overhead and support
resources, raising costs even further.

New management accounting systems have been developed that
capture much better the economics of Plant 11 to reveal that blue pens
consume proportionately much fewer support resources than purple
pens. Basically, as the comparison with Plant I shows, many of an organization's
indirect resources are demanded not in proportion to the
volume of production, but by the transactions associated with producing
a variety of different products and for the production of a batch
of product, regardless of the volume produced in the batch (Miller
and Vollman (1990)).

Activity-based cost (ABC) systems represent a new approach for
measuring the consumption of indirect resources by products and customers7.
ABC systems are designed by first identifying the activities
performed by each support and operating department and then computing
the unit cost of performing these activities. For example, the
activities of a materials handling department could be identified as
moving incoming materials from the receiving dock into inventory to
machines (proportional to the number of incoming shipments), moving
materials from inventory to machines (proportional to the number
of setups), and moving finished goods into the packaging and shipping
area (proportional to the number of shipments made in a period).

Based on interviews and observation, the total expenses of the materials
handling department would be assigned to the three main activities
it performs, counts made of the quantity of each type of activity
performed in a period, and the expenses of each activity divided by
the quantity of activity performed to obtain the unit cost of each activity.

Once the unit costs of all activities have been determined, we can
accurately assign support and indirect expenses to products based on
the number of activities performed for each individual product. The
expenses assigned to individual products with the activity-based analysis
are usually strikingly different from those reported by any traditional
system. The assigned indirect expenses of relatively simple,
high volume, mature products ( such as blue pens) generally declines
by amounts ranging up to 5 and 15%, not a huge amount, but significant
for mature products sold in highly competitive, price sensitive
product markets. The indirect expenses assigned to complex, specialty
products, especially those produced in quite small batches (like purple
pens) can increase, however, by factors ranging from 100% to 1.000%.

When the expenses of support activities are traced directly to products,
improvements in production processes - to reduce setup times,
to improve material layouts, to focus the factory, to reduce order processing
costs and to design products with fewer and more common
parts - produces an immediate and direct reduction in costs assigned
to products. Any savings produced by continual improvement efforts
to reduce defects or achieve just-in-time production capabilities can
be directly attributed to the products where the improvements have
been made.

The ABC analysis also helps to explain the widely observed phenomenon
that overhead increases when production volume expands
but tends to remain fixed when volume contracts. Volume usually expands
by adding new product models and features that create a demand
for additional overhead resources to handle the increased diversity
and complexity of operations. When volume contracts, however，
it does so across the board and the company must still support
its full product line. Therefore, diversity and complexity remain constant
even as volume contracts, causing the demand for many overhead
resources to remain constant. Companies who have tried to reduce
their overhead costs, by across the board spending cuts, but who
have not eliminated the cause or demand for overhead, have found
that they eventually must restore the overhead resources recently eliminated
in order to cope with the complexity of operations that has
remained in the factory.