Supply chain management, activity-based costing and organisational factors

Abstract

In today's intense global competition, supply chain management (SCM) is as a vital tool for helping managers to improve productivity, profitability and the performance of their organisations. In doing so, SCM requires more accurate cost data regarding all activities and processes within the organisations. Given the above, activity-based costing (ABC) can significantly contribute to global supply chain management as it is suggested to fulfil the above requirements by providing more accurate, detailed and up-to-date information on all activities and processes in organisations. Contributing to the SCM and ABC literature, current study first identifies different types of improvements which ABC can offer to SCM and the performance of the organisations, then it examines the extent of association between business size as well as business industry (as organisational factors) affecting the adoption of ABC in New Zealand (NZ) through using a survey questionnaire and targeting NZ qualified CIMA members. To improve SCM and organisations’ performance by increasing the adoption of ABC in organisations, one of the main implications of the findings is that the adoption of ABC in smaller firms needs more attention compared with the larger firms regardless of their industries (manufacturing versus non-manufacturing firms). However, when the decision is made to implement ABC, non-manufacturing firms (rather than manufacturing firms) need more attention to proceed with a higher level of adoption of ABC.