| To improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the logistics operations within an individual firm or supply chain, logistics managers require accurate and timely information on logistics activities and costs, including how best to allocate these costs among customers, products, services, suppliers, and other important cost objects. Traditional management accounting techniques often provide information that is of limited use to logistics managers. Activity-Based Costing (ABC) provides a different approach to management accounting, giving managers both more accurate cost information and fresh insight into the activities consuming organizational resources.; This research studied the experiences of eleven organizations in applying ABC techniques within their logistics operations. Specifically, the objectives of this study were to discover motivations for ABC use within logistics, to discover characteristics of ABC systems used in logistics, to explore capabilities and deficiencies of ABC systems used in logistics, and to discover the impact of ABC use within logistics in terms of logistics decision making and attitudes of logistics practitioners. A case study methodology was followed using structured interviews of selected personnel within each organization and performing content analysis on the resulting, transcribed data.; The study found that the primary motivation of firms in implementing ABC within logistics was to gain a better understanding of their product and/or service costs due to difficulty in costing their logistics operations. The complexity of firms' ABC models was generally found to be independent of a number of other factors, including the degree of price sensitivity in the marketplace and the number of different decisions supported by the ABC system. Most models were limited in scope, all models fully allocated costs to the cost objects of interest, and none of the models incorporated capacity measures. Despite the fact that most firms reported that their ABC systems were providing improved information for decision making and were worth the investment, firms were divided on whether the ABC data had resulted in improvements to their competitive positions in their respective markets. |
