CASE STUDY - OVERHEAD COSTS ANALYSIS
Yong-Woo Kim1 and Glenn Ballard2
ABSTRACT
Construction projects become complicated and fragmented so that many specialty
contractors are involved. In such changed environments, a general contractor’s overhead
costs are increasing comparable to direct costs. In addition to an increase of volume,
activities consisting of overhead costs play an important role in coordinating different
participants who include different specialty contractors and client.
This paper reviews traditional overhead control and critiques problems thereof
through literature review, interviews with professionals, and data collection. It proposes a
new overhead cost control method, called profit-point analysis (PPA) applying activitybased
costing (ABC). It is followed by a case study presented to exemplify the new
method.