複合型 都市施設의 開發方向에 關한 硏究

Abstract

Under the changing business environment which becomes more complicated and diversified, the most important factor in business decision makings will be a determination of accurate costs and prices for the products. The most reasonable and appropriate way to fix the prices comes from proper allocations of production costs to each individual product. However, it is said that there has been some incongruity in allocating product's indirect costs in the traditional cost accounting system. An article by Cooper and Kaplan(1988) was the one that introduced the activity-based costing(hereafter, ABC) system to get over such inconsistency in product costing. In this respect, this thesis aims to review and verify the effect of the ABC system on product costing. This research is primarily based on the previous studies on this subject as well as a new case study in which the ABC system is applied to a real situation. Most of the previous research on the ABC system are analytical instead of actual application. Moreover, the system is discussed as related to big companies. This research focuses on a real application of the ABC system to a small company in order to determine its usefulness and practicability. In addition, it also concentrates on verifying the contribution of the ABC system to determining accurate product costs and some potential cost savings which are created by eliminating unnecessary non value-added activities in suggested product costing system. The research result could be utilized for future application of the system to the other small or medium sized firms. Some of the notable findings of the research are as follows: 1) Accurate allocation of indirect costs helps to determine correct product costs and, subsequently, to make proper and efficient decisions in the bidding prices and the final contracts. 2) There is a significant cost savings by eliminating the non value-added activities through a detailed activity analysis in the ABC system. 3) Such cost savings could be achieved by eliminating duplicated activities in many different production divisions. It gives the company a new opportunity to utilize valuable time and manpower for many necessary R&D and to expedite the localization of many parts and components of products. As a conclusion, the ABC system is really useful for recovering some incongruity of the traditional cost accounting system in product costing. However, there are still many problems in applying the system in real situations. Therefore, it will be necessary to continue research on cost driving factors and a simple way to implement the ABC system to real manufacturing firms.