Activity Based Costing and Management

Introduction

Your business processes deliver output and value to your customers but how much do they cost your organisation? How much more does it cost when a customer has particularly demanding requirements or when a product/service adds complexity? Indeed, who are your profitable customers and what can you do about the unprofitable ones? Similarly, which are your profitable products and services and which are unprofitable and why? Activity Based Costing (ABC) and Activity Based Management (ABM) helps organisations answer these questions and ultimately establish a different approach to managing customers, products, services and resources.

Objectives

At the end of this 3 day course delegates will:

• Understand the key principles and techniques of Activity Based Costing
• Be able to develop an activity dictionary and determine the activity resource cost drivers for their organisation.
• Be able to link activity cost drivers to their organisation’s products, services and customers.
• Be able to use ABC to measure, analyse and plan capacity.
• Understand how operational ABM can be used to increase efficiencies, lower costs and enhance asset utilisation — do things right.
• Understand how strategic ABM can be used to increase profitability by shifting the demand mix away from unprofitable activities — doing the right things

Course Content

• Introduction
• Problems with standard costing systems
• Kaizan costing and pseudo-profit centres
• Defining an Activity Dictionary
• Defining Resource Cost Drivers
• Establishing an ABC hierarchy of activities
• Coding activity attributes
• Linking activity costs to products, services and customers
• ABC accuracy and cost trade-off
• Capacity analysis and planning
• ABM in context
• Operational ABM
• Identify and prioritise improvement opportunities
• Justifying improvements and tracking the benefits
• Ongoing improvement
• Strategic ABM
• Product mix and pricing
• Customer relationships
• Supplier selection and management
• Product design and development
• ABM in the “future”?
• Integration with financial systems
• Budgeting and transfer pricing

Coaching

To help delegates apply their new knowledge and skills to developing their ABC model and apply ABM for their organisation a coaching programme for individuals or teams can be established, for details click coaching.
Who should attend?

The course is for executives, managers and senior staff who want to understand how ABC and ABM can be used to improve the performance of their organisation, you do not need to be an accountant to get value from this course. The course is suitable for both the manufacturing and service sectors. The course is for a maximum of 15 people. Customised courses and workshops are also available as in-company programmes.