The answer is Activity-Based Cost Management, and this crystal-clear, persuasive, and authoritative book will help you understand and implement ABC/M quickly and easily.

Managerial accounting is now transitioning into managerial economics, reveals author Gary Cokins, a worldwide expert on activity-based cost management. With the technology we have at our disposal, ABC/M will provide you not only with a more accurate picture of your company's costs but also with the critical information you need to make better decisions and perform better and more in alignment with your company's defined strategy.

Cokins explains exactly why ABC/M is far superior than traditional costing for your needs in today's business environment, and how it will help you manage costs, increase profits, and make better decisions. You'll learn to use ABC/M to:

* Map the preferences of your prospects and customers back to your organization's business processes and cost structure

* Adopt an effective and more reliable method of estimating and budgeting for costs, price quotations, investment alternatives, and decisions

* Construct a fair "chargeback" billing system that reflects the true consumption of costs by your end users and service recipients

* Remove waste, redundancy, and unused capacity

* Develop a "lean" accounting system to match your new lean operations practices

* Finally measure the hidden costs of "non-quality" that is the focus of Six Sigma and other quality management philosophies

Now you can stop allocating resources and begin tracing and assigning them based on the real, measurable cause-and-effect relationships within your organization. Written in language as entertaining as it is accessible, Activity-Based Cost Management: An Executive's Guide gives you the tools you need to construct an efficient ABC/M model and use it to ensure your company's success.

"Business leaders are always being presented with proposals to 'improve' corporate performance. Cokins turns ABC/M into an objective tool for forecasting the actual costs in an improved environment. Every executive should follow Gary's methods to predict benefits before risking company and career on a multimillion-dollar program."--Hugh D. Pinkus, Executive Consultant, Industrial Sector, Business Innovation Services, IBM Global Services

"Gary Cokins advances Activity-Based Cost Management the next step. In addition to providing the roadmap for ABC/M implementation success, Gary reveals the real strategic applications of ABC/M."--Joe Kosinski, Director, Corporate Manufacturing Accounting, Abbott Laboratories

"ABC/M is lucky to have Gary Cokins as its advocate. Gary has the gift to take the concept that many view as complex and reduce it to its simplest terms, and he has done so again here. After reading this book, you will have an understanding of the power of ABC/M as a tool to understand costs and make better business decisions."--John F. Morrow, CPA, AICPA Vice President, The New Finance

"Gary Cokins has helped light the way for cost and profitability analysis practitioners for many years. His wit and vivid metaphors engage a broad audience of managers and executives, helping generate not only new levels of understanding but also genuine enthusiasm for applying 'accounting' tools to improve bottom-line performance."--Tim Jordheim, Manager, ABC/M Center of Expertise, Cargill, Inc.

"Making sense of complex end-to-end business processes can hinder timely and substantive improvements. This thorough and engaging book shows how processes can be reduced to activity-level building blocks where resource consumption relationships can be identified and evaluated. Insights gained from these evaluations can then be used to motivate and prioritize changes that bring actual process-related costs into balance with other organizational goals such as productivity, cycle time, quality, and customer satisfaction."--Hal Thilmony, Senior Manager, Financial Business Process Improvement, Cisco Systems

As the growth of the Internet shifts power to consumers, the pressure on companies to keep prices low will continue to mount. Increasingly corporations are relying on "margin management" and supply chain management as a means of keeping prices low while raising profits. Activity-based costing and management (ABC/M) data is key to succeeding in both these critical management strategies. This book explains how executives can effectively use the information furnished by cutting-edge ABC/M systems. The author, an acknowledged expert in the field, clearly defines the ABC/M system and explains how to use the information it provides for best results. He provides a rational framework for understanding the fifteen key defining characteristics of ABC/M and arms readers with an ABC/M Readiness Assessment test along with extremely user-friendly exhibits.

Gary Cokins(Far Bingham Farms, MI) is Director of Industry Relations at ABC Technologies, the world's leading supplier of activity-based information software. He is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author.