Development of a strategic management tool in a thermal power plant using ABC and BSC models

Abstract

In today's dynamic, uncertain and highly competitive business environment, the long term success of an organization critically depends on the perceptions, choices and actions of its managers regarding their strategies. Activity based costing (ABC) and balanced scorecard (BSC) are the modern day management approaches acknowledged as reliable tools for strategy formulation and implementation in an organization. In this paper, ABC and BSC models are separately proposed and applied in the merry-go-round (MGR) department of an Indian thermal power plant. The results elicited from adoption of these two models in the said power plant provide more accurate, timely, and reliable operational and financial information at different activity levels of the organization, which would help in effective strategic and tactical decision making. Even though, there are limited published research papers related to application of ABC model in power plants, none of them has adopted ABC and BSC techniques in an Indian contextual environment. Additionally, an integrated ABC-BSC model is designed to harness the complementary synergies of both ABC and BSC models.