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Chapter 3: The Outsourcing of the enterprise activities
and the cost analysis

3.5. From the traditional book keeping method to the Activity Based Costing

An accounting method used which informative support to the control process must be in a position to supplying the necessary information to the corrected development of the decisional process current and to support the process of measurement of the performances of the organization.
In the decisional process it is possible to distinguish between relative choices to the definition of the productive structure of the company (investment choices) and choices connected to I use of the productive structure (running choices) 18 .
According to a formulation widely shared, the running choices regard:

In the support to the decisional process, the informative system must be in a position to supplying to the decisive subjects a forecast on the economic consequences of the decisions that they are call to take to you.
The choice of the model of cost to adopt, that is of the able model to simulate the consequences, express in terms of costs and margins, of the various business decisions, coincides with the role of the informative system in such ambles you of choice.
The study of the systems of survey and measurement in the production companies has endured an acceleration without previous.
On one side under the push of emphasizing itself of the competition in the markets, the companies have searched new and more sophisticated instruments than support to the decisional process. From the other, to continuation of the development of new approaches to the production, the decisional models have been subordinates to one deep review.
The reflection around to the systems of measurement using itself just in productive atmospheres innovated to you is not today concluded and the ferment around to the various proposals is ignited and of great interest.
The cost which element of measurement of the rationality of the behaviors has lost part of original meant its.
That has had to the inability of the accounting methods to express a cost that is expression of the consumption of resources in coherent way with logic of operation of the adopted productive system.
To forehead of the created urgency inasprirsi of the international competition and from the strong competitiveness of the enterprises of the countries of the Far East, the studies and the searches in the field of the accounting methods of survey have begun, to leave from the half of years eighty, to produce, first critical analysis on the existing accounting methods and then proposed of solutions of the problems that were it identifies to you.
The search of new models of management that could, in some way, to facilitate the task of the high direction is born in the moment in which conscience of the fact is taken that, in order to conserve the own competitiveness, the companies must be engaged to eliminate waste, to rationalize the processes and the organizational structures, to improve the quality of the products and the services, to reduce the times of delivery, carrying out in correct way the long activities the supply chain.
The accounting analytics has been accused of being one of the main reasons for which the western companies they had not succeeded to maintain the step with the Asian competition.
The accusation was not limited to indicate the accounting like an instrument that had gradually lost its importance in the decisional process, but quite it was succeeded in to accuse the accounting method of being of obstacle to the attainment of the competitive advantages 19 .
The accounting method called Activity Based Costig (of continuation also called ABC) has been proposed which solution of some problems induced from the use of "traditional" the accounting method in the modern productive atmosphere, that is where the productive strategies tied to the timeliness and the flexibility have become one improcrastinabile necessity.
Such model is proposed like a valid one half in order to supply the necessary information for the choices of renewal of the production ways.
The ABC is a system to full cost or full costing, that is a system that aimed at the imputation of the costs generates them to the various products by means of an allocation mechanism.
The objective is that one of rispecchiare the real employment of the resources in the process of industrial production, exceeding the consideration that the volume of production (generally measured through the number of hours of labor or hours machine) was the determining factor in the use of the resources, considering instead one series wider than determining factors the consumption of the production factors (cost driver).
The ABC I found myself on the consideration that the consumption of resources in the production process is legacy not only to the production volume, but also, to activity not exclusively correlated with the same volume of production 20 . The amount of resources employed in the development of these activities more directly is connected to the number and the capacity of the transactions that are carried out to the inside of the organization.
According to this system all the activities of a company exist in order to support the production and the distribution of the products and the services and, consequently, the resources to dedicated they must be put in relation with the production process and their cost inserted in the calculation of the product cost.
Moreover all the costs must be consider you not fixed and therefore mutabili regarding changing of someone it determines elements to you.
Logic of this approach wants the consumption of resources classified for activity, where an activity is identified from with of the undertaken actions, also from various subjects in various organizational units, to the aim to achieve an objective data.
The identification of the activities constitutes a fundamental passage for the performance of an ABC system, to this purpose must place attention to some problematic ones of particular interest, as the requirement to establish a language and a terminology you flavored yourself in company in the moment in which the activities are defined in order to avoid redundancies; the level to which it is decided to receive gives in how much the wide involvement to you of the staff to all the levels in an ABC plan can constitute an important value that he turns out advanced to the cost of the survey.
Although then the complexity of the survey and elaboration of give to you tied to a type system full costing, the development of the information tecnology, that it has carried to a cost reduction of management informed to you, more allow the adoption of sophisticated book keeping instruments to contained costs regarding the past.
For every single activity the consumption of resources in the development of the same activity comes identified the determining factor (activity driver).
Draft, in kind, of factors that determine "the intensity" with which one given activity it comes lend. The determining factors represent variable the exogenous ones that induce the consumption of the same resources, come consider you variable and for every single activity it comes characterized that most important one in terms than consumption of the resources.
Table 3.1: manageriali costs of product and decisions


 

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