Activity-based Cost Management: An Executive's Guide( Series - Wiley Cost Management Series )

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 showshow 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

Proven strategy for reducing production and operating costs while increasing profits

As the growth of the Internet shifts power to consumers, the pressure on companies to keep prices low will continue to mount. Increasingly corporations are relying on "margin management" and supply chain management as a means of keeping prices low while raising profits. Activity-based costing and management (ABC/M) data is key to succeeding in both these critical management strategies. This book explains how executives can effectively use the information furnished by cutting-edge ABC/M systems. The author, an acknowledged expert in the field, clearly defines the ABC/M system and explains how to use the information it provides for best results. He provides a rational framework for understanding the fifteen key defining characteristics of ABC/M and arms readers with an ABC/M Readiness Assessment test along with extremely user-friendly exhibits.

Gary Cokins (Far Bingham Farms, MI) is Director of Industry Relations at ABC Technologies, the world's leading supplier of activity-based information software. He is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author.