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.
Ceramic microwave antennas for mobile applications
Due to their medium to high permittivity values, ceramic microwave materials are attractive as building blocks for miniaturised antenna solutions. Further advantages are low dielectric losses and an excellent temperature stability of standard ceramic materials. Yet, the permittivity of the ceramic material also has a strong influence on the radiation efficiency and bandwidth of the antenna. This implies that in the design process a suitable compromise has to be found between the degree of miniaturisation on the one hand and the antenna efficiency and bandwidth on the other. We describe two approaches towards efficient miniaturised ceramic microwave antennas: the dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) with partial metallisation and the shorting post patch antenna. We focus on design steps taken to ensure both a high degree of miniaturisation and high values of the radiation efficiency, the choice of the ceramic material and the experimental performance of the antennas.