The common theme that links these points is that we seem to suffer in business from a lack of visibility of costs as they are incurred through the logistics pipeline. Ideally what logistics management requires is a means of capturing costs as products and orders flow towards the customer. To overcome this problem it is necessary to change radically the basis of cost accounting away from the notion that all expenses must be allo- cated (often on an arbitrary basis) to individual units (such as products) and, instead, to separate the expenses and match them to the activities that consume the resources. One approach that can help overcome this problem is activity-based cost The key to activity-based costing (ABC) is to seek out the "cost drivers' along the logistics pipeline that cause costs because they consume resources. Thus, for example, if we are concerned to assign the costs of order picking to orders then in the