Limitations of Traditional Cost Systems
During the 1980s, critical attention focused on the limitations of TCS (Cooper and
Kaplan, 1991). Cooper and Kaplan (1987) argue that the major limitations of TCS arise
from the use of volume related bases in the second allocation stage, to assign costs from
cost centres to products. They state that this procedure may have been adequate decades ago when direct labour was the principal value-adding activity in the material conversion process.