The purpose of this project is to determine and quantify the costs and benefits of using
Activity-Based Costing (ABC) in a small company environment to support an agile
manufacturing strategy. The traditional costing method used by most small companies
grouped all expenses, except direct labor and direct materials, in a pool and then allocated
these expenses to products based on the number of direct labor or direct machine hours
the product consumed. With the new technologies available to manufacturing enterprises,
direct labor or machine hours were becoming a smaller component of product costs but
were still being used to assign overhead costs. The result was that all products were being
over or under costed as these companies did not understand the impact these new
technologies had on their cost structure.