Activity-based costing/management and its implication for operations management

摘要

Activity-Based Costing/Management (ABC/M) is an Information System developed in the 1980s to overcome some of the limitations of traditional cost accounting and to enhance its usefulness to strategic decision-making. In this paper, we show how an ABC/M system can serve as a useful information system to support effective operations decision-making processes. We propose a conceptual framework, Operations Hexagon, to discuss the managerial implications of an ABC/M system for various operations management decisions related to product planning and design, quality management and control, inventory management, capacity management and work force management. By viewing an ABC/M system as an enabler to improve the operations decision-making, we demonstrate that these systems enable an operations manager to enhance the quality of the decision-making process.