1、1922 单词， 3560 汉字 Source : Frederick WLindahl . Human Resource Planning, 1997, Vol.20 Issue 2, 62-66. 外文文献翻译译文 原文： Activity-Based Costing Implementation and Adaptation Abstract Activity-based costing (ABC) has been much studied and much written about over the last decade. While the topic has received
2、 a great deal of coverage from a technical and theoretical standpoint, accounts of actual implementation experiences have received relatively less study. If ABC is to be an important addition 10 management practice the theory must be translated into successful implementation. This survey reports on
3、the extent of research that applies the theory of organizational change to the topic of ABC implementation. It finds the area under-researched and makes suggestions for new studies. Introduction Over the course of the last decade a management tool called activity-based costing(ABC) has become one of
4、 the more widely embraced of new management methods. While its core lies in cost accounting it has attracted the attention of business managers in general and has been the subject of articles in the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and elsewhere in the business press. And not only is it a major the
5、me in business, it has been adopted in parts of government for instance the IRS and the Department of Defense. What began as essentially an accounting matter has spread to the point where it affects nearly every aspect of an organization from production to marketing. In the early literature about AB
6、C the focus was on the underlying concepts essentially theory development. As the theory began to be implemented farther-reaching consequences were developed for instance the need to reshape performance evaluation measures to reflect the new economics revealed by ABC. As these extensions of the basi
7、c theory started to affect organizations academic researchers came to recognize that profound implementation issues were arising. This in turn has given rise to a segment of the ABC literature on organizational change. It is that literature this paper surveys. The focus of the paper is that part of
8、the organizational change literature that has some theoretical foundation. I will not attempt to survey comprehensively a large number of teaching cases nor accounts of ABC installations in the practitioner literature - articles along the line of In a DoD Environment Hughes Aircraft Sets the Standar
9、d for ABC(Haedicke and Feil 1991). These cases and descriptions have had an important influence on the more academic papers by providing a rich field from which to examine successes and failures. The paper is generally restricted to ABC. Although there aresurely many common lessons and conclusions t
10、hat might be extracted from implementations of TQM (Jensen and Wruck 1994) or JIT (Klein 1989) I will not attempt in this paper to make those connections. Finally I note that this is quite a new and accordingly rather small, literature. Only in about 1990 did rigorous study of ABC implementation bec
11、ome part of our literature. Moreover there are those (e.g. Hopwood 1983) who believe that the whole area of studying accounting in the contexts in which it operates is underdeveloped. The next section gives a description of ABC. The third section is the review and the final section concludes. Discus
12、sion This section outlines the basic ideas of ABC and how the basic ideas have spread to other areas of management. An explicit aim of cost accounting has always been to use an accounting system that assigns to products a dollar amount that reasonably reflects the value of resources actually consume
13、d to create that product - whether a good or a service. Some resources are fairly easy to account for, like the paper in a book. The greater challenge lies in allocating resources where the connection between the resource and a unit of the final product is indirect unobservable and imprecise like in
14、dustrial engineering services. In recent years the challenge in allocating indirect resources has increased greatly for several reasons. (1) Indirect cost as a fraction of total cost has increased e.g. automation: the substitution of machines (indirect) for direct laborers (easily traced). (2)Increa
15、sing proliferation of product models and types, where complex production scheduling, parts inventories, etc. add to indirect costs； e.g. automobile models and options. (3) Decreasing reliability of the base which has traditionally been used to allocate direct costs； direct labor time. This changing
16、manufacturing world has led to the need for better methods of assigning costs. The key idea of ABC is that activities cause costs products do not cause costs. The design of an ABC system rests on identifying the relationship between an indirect resource and the activity that consumes it. Once that i
17、s done, the product cost is simply the cross product of the activities that were incurred to produce that product and the cost per unit of the activity. ABC started out. then, as a solution to a product costing problem. Revised product costs lead directly to marketing implications: when a new, more reliable cost system shows that some products are generating less revenue than their cost, marketing practices should change, for example, re-pricing, abandonment, changing product promotion policies, etc.
