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THE AUTHORS DISCUSS THE ACTIONABLE COST OBJECT SELECTION CRITERIA THEY HAVE DEVELOPED AS A RESULT OF SUPERVISING APPROXIMATELY 60 ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING STUDIES OVER THE PAST NINE YEARS.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This article discusses the selection of cost objects that enable an activity-based costing (ABC) system to provide meaningful information to those developing a coordinated operations and marketing strategy to enhance company profits. As a result of having supervised many MBA student team projects that used ABC to help create business plans for small businesses, the authors have developed some guidelines for selecting cost objects that provide information to suggest profit-enhancing actions by the business. Those guidelines are discussed and examples are provided from some of the more successful student projects conducted for small businesses.
For several years, we have team-taught an MBA module that integrates marketing, operations management, and management accounting. The module involves a practicum in which the students work in project teams to develop a business plan for a small business of their choice. The business plan focuses primarily on a coordinated operations strategy and marketing strategy for the small business. As part of the practicum, however, the project team supplements the traditional accounting system of the small business with an activity-based costing (ABC) system. The team is encouraged to use the information from the ABC system as a basis for coordinating the operations and marketing strategies in the business plan.
In the early years of this integrated module, the project teams would choose the company's various products or services as the cost objects and develop their ABC information systems to determine the profitability of each product or service. The business plans that focused on the products or services were often less than satisfactory because of the highly competitive environment in which the companies operated.
As one might expect, the ABC information system often revealed that some products or services were unprofitable. From the project team's viewpoint, the obvious solution to enhancing the company's profitability was to increase the prices of those products or services; but the owners of the small businesses were quick to point out that the price is determined by the market and that their businesses were "price takers," not "price makers." This was especially true of products or...