Success Strategies in Activity- Based Management. Awareness of the benefits of activity- based costing solutions is on the rise, as companies strive to obtain the true cost of products and services and identify added- value business processes. This boom in interest has led software vendors to develop sophisticated tools to implement ABC/ABM. But as anyone who has been involved in the process will tell you, nothing about it is easy. To identify the keys to a successful project, Controller Magazine gathered a panel of industry experts, software vendors and financial managers at the CMC 2. Controller Magazine: Let's focus on three key areas in activity- based costing and activity- based management: project design and getting under way; nonfinancial involvement in a project; and systems development and implementation. First, what are some of the reasons behind the success of a project design and implementation?

Julie Goldman: I think the key is your culture. Everybody says you've got to have upper management's commitment. That probably helps a lot. In some cultures you can do it from the grass roots.

Matthew Smith: The customer buy- in is of primary importance. The projects I've seen that have been the most successful are those in which the end users of the system helped to design it. James W. Mays: The thing that fostered our ramp- up with the system was to identify the individual managers in our organization who we thought were in most need, .. One is a functional- based identification of activities. The alternative is a process- based view where an organization starts with the key processes that the company uses and then identifies the key activities that drive those processes. Now I can't say that one is right or one is wrong, but we've seen much more success with those implementing a process- based approach. Brian Higgins: We use a process approach as well, but we're a very aggressive company with aggressive goals and short time spans to do them in.

Activity based costing. Companies implement activity based costing in. What is activity based.

So we set up a model whereby we can essentially implement a full ABM study all the way through to recommendation and everything else within a very short time period. Bruce Hadley: I've seen projects that are large and successful and small and successful.

I've seen them with corporate cheerleaders and buy- in from the top that are successful and some that aren't. The common theme in every successful project I've seen is multifunctional representation. Controller Magazine: How do you go about identifying the most significant processes at the beginning of the project? Steve Player: I would urge anyone to get a copy of the global best practices process classification scheme, which .

Activity Based Costing in. Despite the fact that it is over 75 years old, most companies still use standard cost. Hyperion Activity Based Management Software. Job costing software to help. Solutions360 is the leading provider of PSA software for Integration companies that. Activity based costing.

Software companies moving their strategic focus towards integrated ABC and Enterprise. Activity-based costing is a method of measuring the cost and performance of. Activity-based costing (ABC costing). Chutchian-Ferranti explains that the software can be. OF ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING. Companies that implement activity. Most prominent Activity Based Costing software vendors included in knowledge. QPR CostControl is a Netherlands based software vendor with offices and.

It's what they use to categorize all of their information, so when you move out from process management into benchmarking and figure out what best practices are, this is a scheme by which data has already been collected and catalogued. You can start there, then drive down specifically for your industry, and from there down into your company. That can get you going very quickly. Chris Pieper: The key is that you think about your customers.

Why do they pay you to be in business? What are the processes that we do that allow us to deliver products to the end users? Julie Goldman: We took what I might call a quick and dirty approach. We sat for a whole day with the senior executives of the division and brainstormed about who are the customers, what are they buying, what are the revenue streams, what are the processes. We came out with a model, which we then went around with to each of the cost centers or departments and got their buy- in to this model. It's much easier for somebody to start thinking if there's something on a piece of paper.

Tom Cucuzza: It helps to look at the process boundaries in such a way that you could look at each business process as being a stand- alone function that you could basically run as a separate business that you could outsource.