外文翻译
原文
Application of Activity-Based Costing in a Manufacturing Company: A Comparison
with Traditional Costing
Material Source: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Dokuz Eylul, Turkey
Author: Gonca Tuncel, Derya Eren Akyol, Gunhan Mirac Bayhan, Utku Koker Abstract: Activity-Based Costing (ABC) represents an alternative paradigm to traditional cost accounting system and has received extensive attention during the past decade. Rather than distorting the cost information by using traditional overhead allocation methods, it traces the cost via activities performed on the cost objects (production or service activities) giving more accurate and traceable cost information. In this paper, the implementation of ABC in a manufacturing system is presented, and a comparison with the traditional cost based system in terms of the effects on the product costs is carried out to highlight the difference between two costing methodologies. The results of the application reveal the weak points of traditional costing methods and an S-Curve which exposes the undercosted and overcosted products is used to improve the product pricing policy of the firm.
1 Introduction
The customer driven environment of today’s manufacturing systems an d the competitive pressure of the global economy force manufacturing services and organizations to become more flexible, integrated and highly automated in order to increase their productivity at reduced costs. But it is impossible to sustain competitiveness without an accurate cost calculation mechanism. Proposed by, as an alternative method to traditional cost accounting methods, ABC assigns costs to activities using multiple cost drivers, and then allocates costs to products based on each product’s use o f these activities. Using multiple activities as cost drivers, it reduces the risk of distortion and provides accurate cost information.
In an ABC system, the total cost of a product equals the cost of the raw materials plus the sum of the cost of all value adding activities to produce it. In other words, the ABC method models the usage of the organization resources by the
activities performed and links the cost of these activities to outputs, such as products, customers, and services. Each product requires a number of activities such as design, engineering, purchasing, production and quality control. Each activity consumes resources of different categories such as the working time of the manager. Cost drivers are often measures of the activities performed such as number of units produced, labor hours, hours of equipment time, number of orders received.
In traditional cost accounting systems, direct materials and labor are the only costs that can be traced directly to the product. By using the ABC system, activities can be classified as value-added and non-value-added activities. In order to improve the performance of the system, non-value-added can be eliminated.
Despite the advantages of providing accurate costs, it requires additional effort and expense in obtaining the information needed for the analysis. However, a proper design tool can help to reduce time used for modeling and overcome the difficulties present in designing a cost model.
The primary objective of this paper is to develop an ABC system for a sanitary-ware company and to compare the results of ABC with traditional costing methods. In other words, the aim of ABC analysis is to guide improvement efforts of management in the right direction by providing accurate information about activities.
The organization of the paper is as follows: In section 2, the methodology of ABC is explained. A case study is presented in section 3 to illustrate the application of ABC in a company. Finally, in section 4, the conclusions and the future research directions are given. Some suggestions are offered to improve the performance of the company.
2 Activity-Based Costing (ABC)
ABC is an economic model that identifies the cost pools or activity centers in an organization and assigns costs to cost drivers based on the number of each activity used. Since the cost drivers are related to the activities, they occur on several levels:
（1）Unit level drivers which assume the increase of the inputs for every unit that is being produced.
（2）Batch level drivers which assume the variation of the inputs for every batch that is being produced.
（3）Product level drivers which assume the necessity of the inputs to support the production of each different type of product.
