Topic: Public sector, activity analysis, value added
Introduction
A new department was set up in November 2002 to promote economic development
and regeneration in the B-Ham co.. The department’s staff manage partnership and
corporate initiatives, provide information and advice to businesses and developers and
contribute to local policy in the B-Ham co..
Activity Based Costing
After 6 months in operation the department’s manager Clara Bird decided that the key
activities need to be analysed to identify opportunities for improving service delivery.
Clara believes a ‘cost sampling’ or snapshot’ approach is required to identify key
activities and their costs. This technique will help the department to develop estimates
of how much time is devoted to different activities and then by using an average hourly
rate for all staff Clara will be able to estimate the total annual cost of an activity. The
decision to use an average hourly rate for all staff will save time with the first ‘cost
sampling’.
Introducing a ‘cost sampling’ approach has not been tried in the B-Ham co. before and
other managers have not been informed of Clara’s decision to introduce this technique.
Before she moved to her current post Clara was aware that many managers were critical
of the financial information they received but they were also reluctant to try techniques
such as activity based costing. Managers in the B-Ham co. have described activity based
costing as a technique that is only suitable to other sectors or criticised the complexity
of the technique. Clara is hoping to demonstrate that the ‘snapshot’ approach is
worthwhile.
Clara decided that about 6 to 8 activities need to be identified to give the staff a good
understanding of the key activities in the department. The possibility of identifying 20-30
activities was considered but this was rejected because there was very little time to do
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the work. For the whole exercise it was felt that the information must not take too long
to collect and interpret and the ‘snap shot” should be repeated regularly.
Activity Analysis
The activities identified by Clara and her staff for the first ‘snapshot’ are given in
appendix 1 and the cost drivers are given in appendix 2. For the first 12 months the total
annual staff related cost for the department is £200,000 and the estimated total number
of hours for all staff is 8,000. Clara decided to include only staff related costs in her
calculations as this represented approximately 80% of total department costs.
Value-added activities
The chief executive has indicated that all managers will have to contribute to a cost
reduction exercise in the next 6 months. No details are yet available but Clara believes
managers will be asked to identify value-added and non-value added activities for the
exercise.