A STUDY ON THE ABC APPROACH IN COST MANAGEMENT PRACTICE
Activity-based costing (ABC), an alternative approach to traditional accounting, represents a costing methodology that identifies the main cost drivers, or the main activities in an organization, thus assigning the cost of the products and services according to the number of specific activities or transactions used in the development process of a product or service. This system is based on the measurement of all the activities performed within an organization and provides the companies with the opportunity to efficiently improve their activity or to reduce the costs with no quality loss for their customers. The primary aim of ABC method was to implement a logical system of additional allocation with a better information and improvement in the field of managerial policies, a real cost structure on the basis of which strategic managerial decisions could be further adopted. Under the terms of a continuous growth of fixed cost weighting, we will become more interested in the calculation system of process costing. This costs calculation method can bring on important benefits, especially for service provider companies, considering the high share of common- indirect costs (overhead), in their unit.
An Integrated Dashboard and Balanced Scorecard Solution
Access to information has always been a stringent necessity for any organization. This necessity has become more stringent in the actual economic context, as decisions must be taken in the shortest time. That is why since, the early sixties, the Decision Support Systems appeared. These have evolved together with the client-server technology, during the eighties, towards the today’s Executive Support Systems. Nowadays, these systems tend to be replaced by Dashboards and Balanced Scorecards (BSC), which fulfill the more and more sophisticated and growing information needs of the decision factors. In this article, we shall present an integrated solution for creating dashboards and scorecards using an enterprise portal. In the same time, we will analyze the advantages and disadvantages of a such integrated solution vs. independent solution.
From the Intranet to the Enterprise Knowledge Portal
The Internet (also called “the Web” or the “World Wide Web”) is a worldwide network that allows organisations to send and receive communication (Gray, 2006). Internet technology is becoming increasingly pervasive within organisations. The terms to describe the resulting access to information and suites of applications through the Web browser are having a multiplying effect: intranet, corporate portal, enterprise portal, and enterprise knowledge portal. Technology facilitates the identification, creation, and diffusion of knowledge among organisational elements within and across organisations. For knowledge management, people (and not technology) solve information and knowledge management problems. Wells, Sheina, and Harris-Jones (2000) indicate that less than 5% of employee knowledge is actually captured and accessible across the organisation. Enterprise portals were triggered by the Internet as organisations sought to replace the Internet portal (e.g., Yahoo!) within an organisation to unify information access and improve management of vast information resources (Harris, Phifer, & Hayward, 1999). Enterprise portals are being presented as the tool to revolutionise access to information and knowledge (Cloete & Snyman, 2004). Currently there is a market hype in portal software technology. The aim of this article is to examine some of the literature of the evolvement of the intranet to the enterprise knowledge portal in organisations.