We often hear questions like: Are the shared service chargebacks to my business units’ cost centers accurate and transparent? Will I save any money by using a centralized shared service? Why should I consider a centralized shared service? These are all good questions. To answer them, you need to understand
I want to use SAS’ recent announcement of our Cost and Profitability Management solution as an opportunity to highlight an often overlooked but valuable application of activity-based costing: business process reengineering. But first, just a brief description of Cost and Profitability Management’s new breakthrough capability: In-memory model calculation. SAS’ decision
We all expect the police to be focused on protecting us from harm and catching criminals. And, in my experience, the vast majority of police officers are dedicated men and women who take their service commitment seriously. However, that does not mean our protection should be achieved irrespective of cost.
Do we ever really get pricing right? Sometimes we do, and some of those times are actually on purpose, but it takes a lot of upstream activities to go right in order for pricing to be optimal as well. Too often pricing is that last variable at our disposal when
Take a quick look at the two graphs below. Which one appears to be the LEAST complex construction? You might initially suppose it’s the bottom one, nothing but bar graphs, and maybe just one bar graph, the tallest one on the
In honor of the United Nations World Statistics Day (October 20, 2010), let’s not leave finance out of the party. In fact, let’s continue with our focus from last time on the analytical and decision support payback afforded by Activity-based costing, perhaps the most underappreciated finance tool for adding value
When I attend a conference as a participant, one constructive practice I have acquired is to, immediately after completing the post-conference evaluation form, create my own personal “take away” worksheet. Nothing complicated, just two columns which can be labeled left/right, debit/credit, sooner/later, or plain/peanut. Don’t attempt to create this worksheet
