This approach works well in the limited setting in which it was initially applied, typically a single department, plant, or location. Difficulties arise, however, when you try to roll this approach out on a large scale for use on an ongoing basis. In one large bank’s brokerage operation, the ABC data-gathering process required 70,000 employees at more than 100 facilities to submit monthly reports of their time allocation. The company employed 14 people full-time just to manage the data collection, processing, and reporting.The time and cost demands of creating and maintaining an ABC model on this scale is a major barrier to widespread adoption at most companies. Since the systems that are put in place are updated infrequently (because of the costs of reinterviewing and resurveying), the model’s estimates of process, product, and customer costs soon become inaccurate. What’s more, people waste their time arguing about the accuracy of cost-driver rates that are derived from individuals’ subjective beliefs rather than addressing the deficiencies the model reveals: inefficient processes, unprofitable products and customers, and excess capacity.Traditional ABC models also often fail to capture the complexity of actual operations. Consider the activity “ship order to customer.” Rather than assume a constant cost per order shipped, a company may wish to recognize the cost differences when an order is shipped in a full truck, in a less-than-truckload (LTL) shipment, using overnight express, or by a commercial carrier. In addition, the order may be entered into the system either manually or electronically, and it may be either a standard or an expedited transaction. To allow for the significant variation in resources required by the different shipping arrangements, new activities must be added to the model, thereby expanding its complexity.As the activity dictionary expands—either to reflect more detail about activities or to expand the scope of the model to the entire enterprise—the demands on the computer programs used to store and process the data escalate. Suppose a company has 150 activities in its enterprise ABC model, applies the costs in these activities to some 600,000 cost objects (products and customers), and runs the model monthly for two years. That would require data estimates, calculations, and storage for more than 2 billion items.
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..