US Airway implemented an acttivity-based management (ABM)system to manage its in-house engine maintenance business unit.First, ABM helped determine the cost of engine maintenance with increased accuracy.Second,ABM helped determine the cost of engine maintenance with increased accuracy.Second,ABM provided operational and financial information that allowed work teams to identify opportunities for improvement Thus ABM provided accurate cost information and simultaneously revealed opportunities for improvement.ABM identified 410 activities — such as tear down,welding,waiting for tooling,and rework — of which 47 were identified as non-value-added.The non-value-added activities wewe rank-ordered on the basis of activity cost,which provided information about where the most significant process improvement opportunities wewe located.The various work teams then investigated the root causes of the efforts being expended on the non-value-added.Once the root causes were identified,the teams took action to reduce or eliminate the non-value-added activities.The net result was a process savings of 4.3 million per year.