activity based costing

The additive production processes are increasingly developed from Rapid Prototyping to Additive Manufacturing (AM), which provides an outstanding technological and economic potential for a variety of industries. Particularly in the area of varied small series production these technologies offer significant advantages in terms of reducing component weight, the integration of additional functions and the production of complex geometries or individual components. Due to the juvenileness of the technology there is a lack of knowledge concerning the technology itself, its possibilities and application potentials in many companies. In addition the costs are often regarded as a critical success factor for the widespread use of the technology. In particular the smart use of AM will affect the positive impact on the future economic use of a product throughout its life cycle.

The following article describes an integrated method to calculate the investment and (cost-) effectiveness of a process optimisation using innovative techniques like RFID. It is based on the research project IdentProLog. Starting with analysing and optimizing processes it‘s possible to evaluate them with a method like activity-based-costing. The detailed information about process-times for each resource will be taken from a material flow simulation. Using this way its possible to create and format data with a high confidential level. Furthermore, it is possible to consider dependencies between technical resources, even in your investment analysis.

Transparency concerning direct and indirect costs that occur per product variant within the entire supply network is vital for the successful management of high product diversity. The introduction of variant classes and core processes is a promising approach to achieve transparency of costs for each company as well as for the supply network. By means of activity-based costing, the variant costs can be calculated and subsequently analyzed in order to realize an improved planning of product design, business processes and supply network.

A crucial criterion for the competitiveness of logistic areas (besides the efficency of logistic processes) is cost transparency, i. e. the cost allocation to performed logistic services. Since logistic processes unlike production processes do not generate material goods but services, it is very common to find cost structures where traditional cost accounting systems lead to distortion of costs. Activity-based costing facilitates process-oriented cost calculation and cost allocation to service processes.

Increasingly enterprises are hoping for a decline of marginal unit costs by turning away from in-house logistics. Free competition among contract logistics services is believed to open up new optimisation potentials. At the same time, performance related accounting models permit to transform the formerly fixed logistics costs into variable costs. However, because of the complexity and the customer-specific character of supply chain processes there is no standard method for the rating and selection of suitable service partners. The main problem is to provide information for a detailed description of the expected performance spectrum and thus to enable performance related contract positions. The method of „quantity and product related logistics costs” permits an exact quantification for multi stage products before placing a service order. It is a contribution to cope with the challenges described above.