Product Description

Praise for Activity-Based Cost Management

"Business leaders are always being presented with proposals to ‘improve’ corporate performance. Cokins turns ABC/M into an objective tool for forecasting the actual costs in an improved environment. Every executive should follow Gary's methods to predict benefits before risking company and career on a multimillion-dollar program."––Hugh D. Pinkus, Executive Consultant, Industrial Sector, Business Innovation Services, IBM Global Services

"Gary Cokins advances Activity-Based Cost Management the next step. In addition to providing the roadmap for ABC/M implementation success, Gary reveals the real strategic applications of ABC/M."––Joe Kosinski, Director, Corporate Manufacturing Accounting, Abbott Laboratories

"ABC/M is lucky to have Gary Cokins as its advocate. Gary has the gift to take the concept that many view as complex and reduce it to its simplest terms, and he has done so again here. After reading this book, you will have an understanding of the power of ABC/M as a tool to understand costs and make better business decisions."––John F. Morrow, CPA, AICPA Vice President, The New Finance

"Gary Cokins has helped light the way for cost and profitability analysis practitioners for many years. His wit and vivid metaphors engage a broad audience of managers and executives, helping generate not only new levels of understanding but also genuine enthusiasm for applying ‘accounting’ tools to improve bottom-line performance."––Tim Jordheim, Manager, ABC/M Center of Expertise, Cargill, Inc.

"Making sense of complex end-to-end business processes can hinder timely and substantive improvements. This thorough and engaging book shows how processes can be reduced to activity-level building blocks where resource consumption relationships can be identified and evaluated. Insights gained from these evaluations can then be used to motivate and prioritize changes that bring actual process-related costs into balance with other organizational goals such as productivity, cycle time, quality, and customer satisfaction."––Hal Thilmony, Senior Manager, Financial Business Process Improvement, Cisco Systems

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #386948 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Review

"IIE member and seminar instructor Gray Cokins adds a new book to his list of accomplishments." -- IEE Solutions - Book of the Month 1/02

From the Inside Flap
Back when Henry Ford was producing Model Ts in one black, all-purpose model, traditional cost allocation gave a fairly accurate picture of a company’s expenses. But today, the very nature of doing business has radically changed. Overhead expenses are displacing direct costs. And the complexity of most organizations has increased dramatically. Companies produce more products in greater variation and diversity than ever before, and they service more, and different, types of customers. Add to that the sea change created as the Internet spawns more e-trading market exchanges with auctions and bidding, and it becomes apparent that we need a method that replaces the fuzzy answers of traditional methods with credible assumptions based on valid data.

The answer is Activity-Based Cost Management, and this crystal-clear, persuasive, and authoritative book will help you understand and implement ABC/M quickly and easily.

Managerial accounting is now transitioning into managerial economics, reveals author Gary Cokins, a worldwide expert on activity-based cost management. With the technology we have at our disposal, ABC/M will provide you not only with a more accurate picture of your company’s costs but also with the critical information you need to make better decisions and perform better and more in alignment with your company’s defined strategy.

Cokins explains exactly why ABC/M is far superior than traditional costing for your needs in today’s business environment, and how it will help you manage costs, increase profits, and make better decisions. You’ll learn to use ABC/M to:

• Map the preferences of your prospects and customers back to your organization’s business processes and cost structure
• Adopt an effective and more reliable method of estimating and budgeting for costs, price quotations, investment alternatives, and decisions
• Construct a fair "chargeback" billing system that reflects the true consumption of costs by your end users and service recipients
• Remove waste, redundancy, and unused capacity
• Develop a "lean" accounting system to match your new lean operations practices
• Finally measure the hidden costs of "non-quality" that is the focus of Six Sigma and other quality management philosophies

Now you can stop allocating resources and begin tracing and assigning them based on the real, measurable cause-and-effect relationships within your organization. Written in language as entertaining as it is accessible, Activity-Based Cost Management: An Executive’s Guide gives you the tools you need to construct an efficient ABC/M model and use it to ensure your company’s success.

From the Back Cover
Praise for Activity-Based Cost Management

"Business leaders are always being presented with proposals to ‘improve’ corporate performance. Cokins turns ABC/M into an objective tool for forecasting the actual costs in an improved environment. Every executive should follow Gary's methods to predict benefits before risking company and career on a multimillion-dollar program."––Hugh D. Pinkus, Executive Consultant, Industrial Sector, Business Innovation Services, IBM Global Services

"Gary Cokins advances Activity-Based Cost Management the next step. In addition to providing the roadmap for ABC/M implementation success, Gary reveals the real strategic applications of ABC/M."––Joe Kosinski, Director, Corporate Manufacturing Accounting, Abbott Laboratories

"ABC/M is lucky to have Gary Cokins as its advocate. Gary has the gift to take the concept that many view as complex and reduce it to its simplest terms, and he has done so again here. After reading this book, you will have an understanding of the power of ABC/M as a tool to understand costs and make better business decisions."––John F. Morrow, CPA, AICPA Vice President, The New Finance

"Gary Cokins has helped light the way for cost and profitability analysis practitioners for many years. His wit and vivid metaphors engage a broad audience of managers and executives, helping generate not only new levels of understanding but also genuine enthusiasm for applying ‘accounting’ tools to improve bottom-line performance."––Tim Jordheim, Manager, ABC/M Center of Expertise, Cargill, Inc.

"Making sense of complex end-to-end business processes can hinder timely and substantive improvements. This thorough and engaging book shows how processes can be reduced to activity-level building blocks where resource consumption relationships can be identified and evaluated. Insights gained from these evaluations can then be used to motivate and prioritize changes that bring actual process-related costs into balance with other organizational goals such as productivity, cycle time, quality, and customer satisfaction."––Hal Thilmony, Senior Manager, Financial Business Process Improvement, Cisco Systems

Customer Reviews

Great starting point and continuing reference
This book is an excellent resource for learning and understanding ABC accounting. Unlike many web articles and white papers, Gary's book is a practical not academic approach from someone who has been there, done that, and has the t-shirt. It's filled with lots of explanatory diagrams which help to visualize the concepts presented and are useful when presenting on a high-level to executives under time constraints for reading. Chapter 1 clearly presents ABC basic concepts while Chapter 2 is a direct follow-on expanding the depth and breath of those basic concepts. Chapter 3 addresses the question that all senior management wants to know: Are all your trading partners worth it to you? Subsequent chapters focus on typical ABC modeling applications most relevant to organizations. Chapter 6 gives a very good cross-comparison of project/work order costing vs. ABC that is very helpful to project-centric organizations in understanding how ABC differentiates itself. Chapter 7 succinctly places ABC software in the reengineering software spectrum without getting lost in a technological morass. Chapter 9 addresses rapid prototyping for getting initial results from the methodology that can be tweaked iteratively to grow a more sophisticated ABC model. In conclusion, I highly recommend this book and look forward to Gary's "ABC Management - Making it Work" which is next on my ABC must-read list.

Activity-Based Cost Management -- An Exucutive's Guide
This is an excellent, informative, easy-to-read reference book. I refer to it as a reference book as opposed to an end-to-end text book because you don't have to start at the beginning and read the chapters sequentially in order to understand what you are reading. In today's business world of capitalilzing on your supply chain by measuring internal processes as well as customer/vendor performances, executives need a tool such as this book to use as a quick "help desk" to learn how to measure complete processes to see how profitably resources are being deployed. Having a tool that explains how to figure out which of your customers, vendors, and internal processes are profitable to your business is invaluable.

Gary has brought ABC into the new Millenia
Gary has consistently led the pack by not only illustrating the realities and benefits of ABC, but by explaining how to apply and develop it within new and emerging integrated management environments. This book addresses issues such as Strategic Cost Management, TOC and Capacity management to show how these multiple and complimentary methodologies can be harmonized. Another winner !

Rod MacPherson
President,
StratiSys Consulting Inc.