ABC is a two-stage procedure (See Appendix A). In the first stage it assigns all
costs of resources to the activities in activity centers based on the resource drivers [43].
The amount paid for a resource and assigned to an activity is called a cost element [11].
CAM-I Glossary of Activity Based Management defines a cost pool as a “grouping of all
cost elements associated with one activity” [47]. However, Novin argues that a cost pool
does not have to contain only one activity. It can be formed by classifying a large number
of activities into a few groups. Regression analysis can be used in forming cost pools. A
basic assumption of ABC is that cost pools are homogenous, which means that the costs
of activities in each cost pool should have the same cause-and-effect relationship with the
chosen cost driver [42].
In the second stage, costs assigned to the cost pools are then assigned to the
products based on the product’s consumption of each activity and the level of the activity
in the ABC hierarchy, which will be discussed in the following section. The final costs
assigned to a product are called a cost object. Cost drivers are used to assign the costs of
activities to products. A cost driver is any factor that causes costs to be incurred, such as
number of machine setups, number of engineering change notices, and number of
purchase orders. At least one cost driver is required for each activity. More can be used to
increase the accuracy of the information [42, 43, 46].
It is the second stage described above that separates ABC from traditional
systems. In traditional systems, costs are allocated to products based on just one cost
driver, direct labor hours, instead of using more realistic cost drivers [24].
Another unique feature of ABC is that the focus of this approach is on activities
and the cost of those activities, rather than on products as in the traditional costing
systems. It is this feature of ABC that gives management the necessary information to
identify opportunities for process improvements and cost reductions. By using ABC
information, managers can see the cost of each major overhead activity performed in a
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plant separately, and therefore can give right decisions about where to focus efforts to
reduce costs [6].