The Application Of Activity-based Costing In Cost Management In The Third-party Logistics Enterprises In China

With the development and wide implementation of technology, it is more and more difficult to seek profits through raising productivity and reducing cost in producing and management processes. In this situation, the enterprises, as well as the academia area, put high attention on the logistics cost, since the logistics cost is the last profit seeking area at present. The third party logistics (TPLs), as a new pattern of logistics operating mode, was produced under in this situation. Since it was introduced into china for not long, its' cost management mode and method are not so perfect. How to improve the cost management of TPLs enterprises and the logistics activity has become the most important subject for all of the TPLs enterprises. At present, the cost of a single logistics service product hasn't been calculated by most of the logistics enterprises in our country. For a minority of TPLs enterprises, the cost of logistics service product is calculated under the traditional costing. It appears that the indirect cost is much higher than the direct cost in the TPLs enterprises and the traditional cost calculating method may distort the cost of TPLs enterprises, thus the traditional costing is not fit for the TPLs enterprises. Moreover, the cost management and control can't be carried out without accurate cost information. However, the Activity-Based Costing (ABC) can effectively make up the disadvantages of traditional costing, with much advantages that the traditional costing being without. The main purpose of this paper is to study the application of ABC in cost management and control for TPLs enterprises, from a microscopic view and the angle of the logistics service provider. Methods of application researching as well as methods of integration of quantitative and qualitative analysis were adopted in this paper to confirm the feasibility of ABC in TPLs enterprises, to construct ABC calculation model, to use a case on actual logistics enterprises' data for demonstrating the ABC application in TPLs. And then a study on activity-based cost control was made.This paper was constructed as following: firstly, the present situation of cost management in TPLs enterprises was analyzed, and then some problems existed in the TPLs enterprises of our country were pointed out. Based on this,...