外文翻译--第三方物流企业的作业成本法.doc

1、外 文 翻 译外文出处 International Advances in Economic Research, 2001,7(1): 133-146. 外文作者 Carles Grful-Miquela 原文：Activity-Based Costing Methodology for Third-Party Logistics CompaniesThis paper will analyze the main costs that third-party logistics companies are facing and develops an activity-based costin

2、g methodology useful for this kind of company. It will examine the most important activities carried out by third-party distributors in both warehousing and transporting activities. However, the focus is mainly on the activity of distributing the product to the final receiver when this final receive

3、r is not the customer of the third-party logistics company. Introduction In the last decade, development of third-party logistics companies has been very important. There are several reasons for such development, the most important being the trend to concentrate in the core business by manufacturing

4、 companies and new technological advances, In this context, conventional approaches to costing might generate distorted information, This can result in making wrong decisions. When companies realize this potential danger, the use of activity-based costing (ABC) methodologies increases within third-p

5、arty logistics. Costing Methodology: Definition of the Cost Model and Critique of the Conventional Approach Definition of the Cost Model It is first necessary to define what a cost model is. This can be done through analysis of the main functions that any cost model should perform Kaplan and Cooper,

6、 1998: 1) valuation of inventory and measurement of the cost of goods and services sold for financial purposes; 2) estimation of the cost of activities, products, services, and customers; and 3) provide economic feedback to managers and staff in general about process efficiency. From this definition

7、, a cost model might be analyzed as the tool that companies use in order to have a proper understanding about the cost to run their businesses. One of the purposes of a cost model is to gather and analyze data generated in the company in order to gain useful information for making decisions. Therefo

8、re, the usefulness of a cost model may be evaluated depending on its capacity to generate the right information to make the right managerial decisions. Evolution of Cost Models The evolution of cost systems has not been a linear and continuous process Johnson and Kaplan, 1987. Indeed, by the 1920s,

9、companies had developed almost all the management accounting procedures that have been used up to the present day. Furthermore, between 1925 and 1980, virtually no new ideas have affected the design and use of cost management systems. The same concepts always appear: break-even analysis, cost-volume

10、-profit analysis, direct costing, and fixed and variable cost estimates. The idea that conventional accounts are only finance oriented and simply describe historical inputs is shared among other authors of costing methodology Bellis- Jones and Develin, 1995. Problems with Conventional Approaches As

11、a result of the described evolution of cost models, the situation at the beginning of the 1980s was that the actual management accounting systems provided few benefits to organizations. Normally, the reported information not only inhibited good decision making by managers, but actually encouraged ba

12、d decisions Johnson and Kaplan, 1987. The main reason was the use of an obsolete tool in an extremely different and more complex and competitive environment. The main problem that conventional cost models faced was the allocation of overhead by products on the basis of either direct labor or machine

13、 hour content in the manufacturing environment. This problem was growing at the same time that direct labor and machine hour contents of many products and services fell, while overhead costs increased. Conventional costing ignores important differences between products and services, markets and cust

14、omers, which incur different overhead costs. This was the starting point in carefully analyzing the conventional cost models and in criticizing them because of their uselessness in accurately explaining the cost of products. Lately, the fact that the same issues apply to the service sector has been

15、noticed. Traditional methods of cost accounting showed some other weaknesses Bellis-Jones and Develin, 1995. That is, companies do not know whether their products or services are profitable and they cannot distinguish profitable from unprofitable customers. In addition, traditional methods focus on

16、the short term at the expense of the long term. A Description of ABC Methodology The problems that conventional costing methodologies raised were the main reason for developing a new theoretical approach to this subject. Johnson and Kaplan are considered the inventors of ABC, although they do not us

17、e this terminology at the beginning of their studies Johnson and Kaplan, 1987. The first time the concept of ABC appears is in a later article Cooper and Kaplan, 1988. The analysis of cost and profitability of individual products, services, and customers represents a critical issue that companies we

18、re concerned with and one where ABC tries to help. The primary focus was to ask what is important for the organization, and what information is needed for management planning and control functions. Finally, useful information for managerial purposes should not be extracted only from a system designe

19、d primarily to satisfy external reporting and auditing requirements (financial information). It is necessary to design systems consistent with the technology of the organization, its product strategy, and its organizational structure. Definition of ABC In literature there are several definitions of

20、ABC. The definition here shows the ABC philosophy Hicks, 1992 briefly and clearly: Activity-based costing is a cost accounting concept based on the premise that products (and/or services) require an organization to perform activities and that those activities require an organization to incur costs.

21、In activity-based costing, systems are designed so that any costs that cannot be attributed directly to a product, flow into the activities that make them necessary. The cost of each activity then flows to the product(s) that make the activity necessary based on their respective consumption of that

22、activity. Main Differences Between Conventional Cost Models and ABC The most important difference between conventional cost models and ABC is the treatment of non-volume-related overhead costs. The use of direct labor-based overhead allocation methods were appropriate in the past when direct labor w

23、as the principal component of manufacturing cost, but not today. In the ABC approach, many overheads are related to specific activities to avoid distortions in product and service costs. Another difference is the treatment of unused capacity. ABC describes resources that are used by activities, but

24、conventional accounts describe resources that are supplied. The difference between the two is excess capacity. If excess capacity is allocated to products, services, or customers, there is risk of a dead spiral, as defined by Bellis-Jones and Develin 1995. This means that the company should be aware

25、 of which costs their customers really generate and not allocate the excess of capacity to avoid the risk of overpricing its products or services. Advantages and Benefits of the ABC Approach Several authors have described the main advantages and benefits of using ABC Innes and Mitchell, 1990; Bellis

26、-Jones and Develin, 1995; Malmi, 1997. The most important are as follows: 1) ABC provides more accurate product and service costing, particularly where non- volume-related overheads are significant. 2) By using ABC, it is possible to analyze costs by areas of managerial responsibility and customers.

27、 ABC helps to recognize the way in which customers directly affect the cost structure of the business and therefore helps to analyze customer profitability. 3) ABC provides a better understanding of cost behavior as well as identifying the costs of complexity, variety, and change inherent in both th

28、e kind of service offered and customer-specific requirements. 4) ABC focuses on the activities that add value, which are those activities that create value from the customers point of view. On the other hand, the company should focus on those non-value-added activities and try to eliminate them, alt

29、hough some of the non-value-added activities are necessary to enable value-adding activities to occur. 5) ABC is useful in performing capacity analysis. ABC measures the costs of resources used rather than the costs of resources supplied, the difference being excess capacity. It would be wrong to al

30、locate unused capacity to the customers. To perform this analysis, the use of practical capacity is suggested, which means the capacity reflecting the maximum level at which the organization can operate efficiently. 6) ABC reduces uncertainty and provides a more solid basis for strategic decisions.

31、Therefore, the success of ABC might not depend only on the results of the analysis, but on its ability to provide a correct diagnosis of the companys situation.Disadvantages and Problems of the ABC Approach The disadvantages extracted from a study based on the answers of several companies after one

32、year of using ABC Cobb et al., 1992 regarded the amount of work involved, difficulties in collecting accurate data, and the fact that cost management was difficult because several activities cross department boundaries. Additionally, implementation is very time consuming, requiring not only gatherin

33、g and processing of data, but also interpreting the results. Even though all of the former problems have been overcome with the development of ABC methodology and the increase in using ABC models by companies in different manufacturing and service industries, it is always necessary to be aware of th

34、ese problems when developing such a model. ABC for Logistics Even though literature mentions that ABC applies to all types of business organizations in the service industry, including warehousing and distribution providers Hicks, 1992, the author could not specifically find the case of a third-party

35、 logistics provider as far as the transport operations are concerned. The main issue is to properly allocate the transport operations costs to the consignors, which are the real customers of the company.4 Furthermore, in the literature about transportation costs Sussams, 1992, the customer is always

36、 the final consignee, and the costs are always an external variable. In recent years and because of the increasing importance of logistics costs within companies, the first studies analyzing the utility of the activity-based approach on logistics were undertaken Pohlen and LaLonde, 1994; LaLonde and

37、 Ginter, 1996; LaLonde and Pohlen, 1996. The main benefits and difficulties related to the implementation of ABC for logistics departments are almost the same as those described earlier. Analysis of Overheads The analysis of overheads is the least obvious and the most complicated to perform. Normall

38、y, overheads are related to several activities (or nonactivities), and it is necessary to carry out in-depth studies during long periods of time in order to find out the right links between overheads and products, services, or customers. For this reason, the recommendation is to be as accurate as po

39、ssible in order to link overheads with consignors, avoiding the traditional approach to link, in the first instance, overheads with activities. This is very important when there is an important lack of time for developing such a costing methodology, despite the fact that this is not a pure ABC appro

40、ach. The need to cope with overheads appears on both the warehouse and transport side of the model. Conclusion It is very difficult (and not always recommended) to develop a pure ABC model because the particular characteristics of a single third-party logistics company entailed the use of slightly d

41、ifferent ways to allocate several costs in some instances, which a purely ABC approach would not be able to do. Despite this fact, the final model for both sides of the third-party company operations (warehouse and transport operations) has been mainly described by taking ABC analysis into account.

42、Only when ABC does not present an answer to a specific problem should another way be considered to allocate the costs. It is recommended that such a model should be developed by using a spreadsheet because it fulfills the needs of the company, it is a very powerful tool, and it is also very user-fri

43、endly. Furthermore, the model developed may be capable of performing what-if analysis in order to simulate actual or potential situations the third-party company might face. These what-if analyses may be used in different ways such as in the analysis of potential consignors, in the requirement of di

44、fferent service levels by the current consignors, and to perform the analysis of structural changes in the third-party logistics company. Finally, note that the costs of the model should not exceed its benefits. In other words, it is necessary to cope with the trade-off between a model that is so si

45、mple that it fails toprovide enough information to support the companys decisions and a model that is excessively costly to design, implement, and operate Brimson, 1991. This should always be taken into account, trying to achieve a happy medium between simplicity and excessive sophistication. Source

46、: Carles Grful-Miquela.Activity-based costing methodology for third-party logistics companiesJ.International Advances in Economic Research, 2001,7(1): 133-146.译文：第三方物流企业的作业成本法本文将分析第三方物流企业面临的主要成本问题并开发出适合于这一类企业的成本计算方法。在文中将会探讨所进行的最重要的第三方分销商进行仓储和运输活动过程中的业务处理。不过,重点是主要的产品运输到最终的接收者时,这个接收者却不是第三方物流企业的顾客时的情况。

47、引言在过去的十年里,第三方物流企业的发展一直很重要。原因有几个,最重要的是发展的趋势集中在制造企业的技术进步和新的核心业务,在此背景下,传统的成本计算方法可能产生歪曲的信息,这可能导致做出错误的决定。当公司意识到这一潜在危险时,作业成本方法在第三方物流企业的应用就会增加。成本计算方法:成本模式的定义和对传统方法的批判成本模式的定义首先要定义什么样的成本模型。这可以通过分析一些运行成本模式的主要功能来实现（卡普兰和库珀,1998):1)存货的估价和为金融目的出售商品和服务的成本计量；2)业务、产品、服务和顾客的成本估算；3)提供经济反馈给在工作中做的好的管理者和员工。从这个定义可以看出,成本模型

48、可以作为分析工具,以便能对企业经营成本进行更好的管理。成本模型的其中一个目的是对公司的数据进行集中和分析从而为决策者提供有用的信息。因此,成本的有效性评估模型可以根据其能产生正确的信息,做出正确的管理决策。成本模型的演变成本系统的演变还没有一个线性和持续的过程（约翰逊和卡普兰，1987年）事实上,到了二十世纪二十年代,企业已开发出了几乎所有的管理会计程序，并沿用至今。此外,1925到1980年之间，几乎没有新的观念来影响成本管理系统的设计和使用。总是出现相同的概念:盈亏平衡分析,本量力分析、直接成本以及固定和可变成本的预算。在其他作者的成本理念中普遍认为传统会计只是财务帐目和简单描述历史数据输

49、入（Bellis- Jones and Develin, 1995)。传统方法存在的问题由于成本模型描述演化的结果, 在20世纪80年代初的实际情况是，管理会计系统为企业提供了很少的利益。通常情况下,报告的信息不仅抑制了管理者制定好的决策,而且还支持错误的决定（约翰逊和卡普兰1987年）。主要的原因是在一个完全不同的、更复杂和激烈的竞争环境中使用过时的工具。传统成本模式面临的主要问题是在制造环境中，产品开销的分配是基于直接劳动还是工时计量。同时还增加了这样的问题,许多产品和服务的直接劳动力和机器工时减少,而管理费用却增加了。传统的成本忽略了在产品与服务、市场与客户之间的重要区别,而这些都会产生不同的管理费用。这是仔细分析和批评传统成本模型的起点,因为他们不能准