Content area
Full text
Abstract: Anderson (1995) suggests that the critical success factors change at different stages of implementation for information innovations such as ABC. Using mostly contextual and organizational factors found to be associated with ABC success in prior studies, this study tests how these factors affect ten stages of the ABC implementation process. Based on a survey of U.S. manufacturing firms, different factors become importance as higher stages of ABC implementation are reached. Evidence is also found that the direction and level of importance for many factors varies by stage. For instance, a highquality information system may lead to rejecting ABC before adoption or abandoning it after implementation has started, but it also appears to enable reaching the highest implementation stage. Studies that combine ABC firms from several implementation stages to test certain success factors may distort their significance levels or reject other factors that are only important for certain stages.
INTRODUCTION
Implementing activity-based costing (ABC) is complex and requires advancement through several stages if full infusion, known as activity-based management (ABM), is to be achieved. Recent empirical studies have focused on factors leading to ABC "success" as measured in various ways, but have paid little attention to the various stages in the implementation process. Anderson's (1995) study of the early ABC implementation process at GM suggests a theory that success factors differ and vary in importance during the several stages of implementation. If this theory is true, then studies that examine only certain stages or that pool firms at different stages may generate conflicting results. Using mostly factors found to be associated with ABC success in prior studies, the purpose of this study is to test Anderson's hypothesis and describe how these factors affect each stage of the ABC implementation process.
Both ABC and non-ABC firms are surveyed from a cross-section of U.S. manufacturing firms. The implementation of ABC is divided into ten stages to investigate (1) how certain contextual factors affect the preadoption and adoption stages of ABC and (2) how various contextual and organizational factors affect the several implementation stages. In the first part of the research, ABC adopters are compared with three stages of nonadopters. For this study, adoption is defined as the stage when approval has been granted to devote...