The concepts of Activity Based Costing (ABC) were developed in the manufacturing sector of the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. During this time, the consortium for advanced international now known as CAM-I (Consortium for Advanced Management, International), provided a formative role for studying and formalizing the principles that have become more formally known as Activity Based Costing. In 1980s, much criticisms were raised regarding the ability of traditional costing system (TCS) to provide relevant, timely and accurate information to the management.
Even though studies have shown that the adoption of ABC benefits the organization, its level of adoption is still considered low. Many organizations still hang on to the traditional cost accounting method in dealing with overhead costs (Maelah & Ibrahim, 2007). Adequate resources are needed to design and implement ABC,however, where organization cannot afford these resources definitely ABC system may not be workable. This study addresses these problems so that the complexities or difficulties posed by ABC system can be understood. This study examines the status of ABC adoption among manufacturing companies in Nigeria.
This study will help manufacturing industry in Nigeria to gain insight into the benefits and importance of ABC. Comparing ABC system to traditional method of apportioning overhead expenses to product, managers in operating unit in Nigerian Manufacturing industry will be able to understand why traditional costing method allocate overheads expenses arbitrarily, and why ABC is the best method to apply in the treatment of overheads. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly examines the literature review; Section 3 presents method of analysis; Section 4 centers on the discussion of the results; while Section 5 is devoted to conclusion and recommendations.