Managerial-finance

New Managers and experienced managers alike can benefit from this book. Lots of good ideas to become a better balanced and "empowered" manager.

There's a plethora of books and articles available to anyone who wants to learn about the principles behind activity-based management (ABM). What is somewhat harder to find are practical tips and proven strategies for implementing ABM. The recently published second edition of Activity-Based Management: Arthur Andersen's Lessons from the ABM Battlefield, edited by Steve Player and David E. Keys (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1999), offers advice from professionals who've seen action in the ABM trenches and lived to tell the tale.

Lessons from the ABM Battlefield identifies what kind of organization should employ ABM and why, and explains how to link ABM with other initiatives to further enhance management performance. The first secion offers details on how to overcome 30 pitfalls commonly encountered at three stages of ABM -- starting an ABM initiative, developing a pilot program, and moving from pilot to mainstream application. This section includes topics such as lack of clear objectives, poor communication, poor definition of activities, and lack of project management.

Section Two features twelve firsthand accounts by members of Arthur Andersen's cost management practice who have successfully implemented ABM initiatives at various corporations. These case studies cover a wide range of topics, including storyboarding customer profitability analysis, benchmarking and target costing. The last section of the book addresses the next wave of tools for use in ABM environments, designed to provide readers with a solid practical framework for deploying ABM. These techniques are on the cutting edge of cost management theory and practice.

Lessons from the ABM Battlefield is a clearly-written, accessible guide to the fundamentals of ABM, offering valuable advice and insights from individuals who have "been there, done that."

very good and comprehensive book with up to date informatio

An amazingly simple ,yet comprehensive and well articulated book, which holds your hand in a seven step approach in building and designing a fairly substantial model for a fully integrated business enterprice. Not only this will provide you a fairly robust cost system but will lead you to implementable schmes that will control contain and manage costs esposing the hidden treasures.

With suitable adaptations one can find windows of opportunities in finding revnues for growth with profitabiltiy. More you reread, you will have enrichment not only for your mind but to the business as a whoole.

A comprehensive and complete compendium for cost management.

Hicks has a lot to offer in this book on activity-based costing, however it is not an easy to read. It very quickly dives into the weeds of detail. I think this is a very good second book to read on Activity Based Costing, because it goes into the details of how to actually implement a system. I would recommend that you first read Kaplan's "Cost and Effect," to get a good grounding in the fundamentals before reading this book.

This is a fantastic book on the subject of ABC. The costing model constructed in the book goes into just enough detail to give you a practical foundation for actual implementation, without getting lost in minutiae. At just the right times, the author also reminds you about the big picture and doesn't let you go away thinking correct decisions can all be boiled down to exercises in number-crunching. This is a must-buy, if you're serious about implementing ABC in your organization.

Activity-Based Costing: Making it Work for Small and Mid-Sized Companies, is a very well written and usefull handbook to design and implementation of Activity-Based Costing. It provides: a general description of key concepts of ABC, a practical guide to design of ABC system in the company, as well as description of any potential problems concerning implementation of ABC. I am working as a financial consultant (in Warsaw), and this book has helped me to help many companies that were loosing their cost-effectiveness. I think, that the author should have added some 100 pages to the book, and defined - described some aspects of Activity-Based Management - although that could have been too technical for most of the readers. Overall, I think that the book contains most of the knowledge needed for successful design & implementation of ABC. It really worked for me...

This is an excellent, informative, easy-to-read reference book. I refer to it as a reference book as opposed to an end-to-end text book because you don't have to start at the beginning and read the chapters sequentially in order to understand what you are reading. In today's business world of capitalilzing on your supply chain by measuring internal processes as well as customer/vendor performances, executives need a tool such as this book to use as a quick "help desk" to learn how to measure complete processes to see how profitably resources are being deployed. Having a tool that explains how to figure out which of your customers, vendors, and internal processes are profitable to your business is invaluable.

This is an very informative, book on ABC. It is good reference book for implementing Activity based costing. Today's business world of capitalizing supply chain by measuring internal processes as well as customer/vendor performances, managers need a tool and this helps to learn how to measure complete processes to see how profitably the resources are being utilized and could be measured so that We can see and comprehend the Profit line.

This book is an excellent resource for learning and understanding ABC accounting. Unlike many web articles and white papers, Gary's book is a practical not academic approach from someone who has been there, done that, and has the t-shirt. It's filled with lots of explanatory diagrams which help to visualize the concepts presented and are useful when presenting on a high-level to executives under time constraints for reading. Chapter 1 clearly presents ABC basic concepts while Chapter 2 is a direct follow-on expanding the depth and breath of those basic concepts. Chapter 3 addresses the question that all senior management wants to know: Are all your trading partners worth it to you? Subsequent chapters focus on typical ABC modeling applications most relevant to organizations. Chapter 6 gives a very good cross-comparison of project/work order costing vs. ABC that is very helpful to project-centric organizations in understanding how ABC differentiates itself. Chapter 7 succinctly places ABC software in the reengineering software spectrum without getting lost in a technological morass. Chapter 9 addresses rapid prototyping for getting initial results from the methodology that can be tweaked iteratively to grow a more sophisticated ABC model. In conclusion, I highly recommend this book and look forward to Gary's "ABC Management - Making it Work" which is next on my ABC must-read list.