作业成本法的实施和适应性【外文文献翻译

外文文献翻译译文

原文：

Activity-Based Costing Implementation and Adaptation

Abstract

Activity-based costing (ABC) has been much studied and much written about over

the last decade. While the topic has received a great deal of coverage from a technical and

theoretical standpoint, accounts of actual implementation experiences have received

relatively less study. If ABC is to be an important addition 10 management practice the

theory must be translated into successful implementation. This survey reports on the

extent of research that applies the theory of organizational change to the topic of ABC implementation. It finds the area under-researched and makes suggestions for new studies. Introduction

Ov er the course of the last decade a management tool called ―activity-based

costing‖(ABC) has become one of the more widely embraced of new management

methods. While its core lies in cost accounting it has attracted the attention of business

managers in general and has been the subject of articles in the Harvard Business Review,

Fortune, and elsewhere in the business press. And not only is it a major theme in business,

it has been adopted in parts of government for instance the IRS and the Department of

Defense.

What began as essentially an ―accounting‖ matter has spread to the point where it

affects nearly every aspect of an organization from production to marketing. In the early

literature about ABC the focus was on the underlying concepts –essentia lly ―theory

development‖. As the theory began to be implemented farther-reaching consequences

were developed for instance the need to reshape performance evaluation measures to reflect the new economics revealed by ABC. As these extensions of the basic theory started to affect organizations academic researchers came to recognize that profound implementation issues were arising. This in turn has given rise to a segment of the ABC literature on organizational change. It is that literature this paper surveys.

The focus of the paper is that part of the ―organizational change‖ literature that has some theoretical foundation. I will not attempt to survey comprehensively a large number of teaching cases nor accounts of ABC installations in the practitioner literature - articles along the line of ―In a DoD Environment Hughes Aircraft Sets the Standard for

ABC‖(Haedicke and Feil 1991). These cases and descriptions have had an important influence on the more ―academic‖ papers by providing a rich field from whi ch to examine successes and failures. The paper is generally restricted to ABC. Although there aresurely many common lessons and conclusions that might be extracted from implementations of TQM (Jensen and Wruck 1994) or JIT (Klein 1989) I will not attempt in this paper to make those connections.

Finally I note that this is quite a new and accordingly rather small, literature. Only in about 1990 did rigorous study of ABC implementation become part of our literature. Moreover there are those (e.g. Hopwood 1983) who believe that the whole area of studying accounting in the contexts in which it operates is underdeveloped.

The next section gives a description of ABC. The third section is the review and the final section concludes.

Discussion

This section outlines the basic ideas of ABC and how the basic ideas have spread to other areas of management.

An explicit aim of cost accounting has always been to use an accounting system that assigns to products a dollar amount that reasonably reflects the value of resources actually consumed to create that product - whether a good or a service. Some resources are fairly easy to account for, like the paper in a book. The greater challenge lies in allocating resources where the connection between the resource and a unit of the final product is indirect unobservable and imprecise like industrial engineering services.

In recent years the challenge in allocating indirect resources has increased greatly for several reasons. (1) Indirect cost as a fraction of total cost has increased e.g. automation: the substitution of machines (indirect) for direct laborers (easily traced). (2)Increasing proliferation of product models and types, where complex production scheduling, parts inventories, etc. add to indirect costs; e.g. automobile models and options. (3) Decreasing reliability of the ―base‖ which has traditionally been used to allocate direct costs; direct labor time. This changing manufacturing world has led to the need for better methods of assigning costs. The key idea of ABC is that activities cause costs products do not cause costs. The design of an ABC system rests on identifying the relationship between an indirect resource and the ―activity‖ that consumes it. Once that is done, the product cost is simply the cross product of the activities that were incurred to produce that product and the cost per unit of the activity. ABC started out. then, as a solution to a ―product costing‖ problem. Revised product costs lead directly to marketing implications: when a new, more reliable cost system shows that some products are generating less revenue than their cost, marketing practices should change, for example, re-pricing, abandonment, changing product promotion policies, etc.

In the operations realm, the ABC perspective makes clear that production managers do not manage costs they manage activities (which in turn create costs). This implies that ABC can and should be used for more than passively measuring costs it can be used

actively to manage costs. Among other uses it has been used to improve quality by estimating the costs of ―non-value-adding‖ activities (MacArthur 1992). The extension of ABC to cost management is termed ―activity-based management‖.

Activity-based management reaches beyond manufacturing. Returning to the marketing department, it becomes clear that the costs of marketing can be analyzed in terms of the ―activities‖ that cause them, just as is the manufacturing process (Foster et al.1996). A large Dutch firm Philips NV performed an analysis of one of its business unitsin which administrative departments that support production - personnel among others –were examined in terms of the ―activities‖ which drove their costs (Groot 1997). This study resulted in revised methods of allocating the costs to the production departments and also in personnel reductions in the administrative departments.

―ABC thinking‖ calls into question performance measurement. If the new ―activity‖ insights call for different emphasis then performance measurements should direct managers efforts toward that emphasis. Further with ABC thinking traditional budgeting practices become suspect - it makes more sense to start with the number of times an activity is to be perform ed as the basis for the budget than to start with last year’s budget and add 5% .ABC thinking also changes the criteria for design: product designers, armed with information about the cost of manufacturing activities, could design a product to minimize manufacturing cost (Berlant et al. 1990).

The list goes on. The point is that ABC is a tool that affects behavior throughout an organization. Because it changes established routines and revises performance and compensation standards, it has important behavioral consequences. It is no surprise then that not every attempt to capture the benefits of better cost measurement has met with success. It is true that there is a selection bias that makes it harder to learn the failures than the successes, but nevertheless there is abundant evidence of slow, stalled, or

abandoned ABC implementations as well as important advances. Before proceeding tothe academic study of this implementation process a description of the scope of ABC is in order.

ABC is not universally accepted. There is a substantial population of organizations that believes that the cost exceeds the benefit. It appears that even among organizations that have adopted it. It is most likely done ―off line‖ with spreadsheets and special studie s it has not replaced the traditional accounting system used to create financial statements. Since many of the uses of ABC - product pricing for example - do not depend on ―real time‖ information, many of the benefits of ABC are available even without the cost of restructuring the accounting system. Despite the absence of a wholesale changeover to ABC systems the concepts of ABC have been influential and have certainly affected policies in a wide range of organizations.

Survey

Bruns (1987) performed an early detailed field study of a firm that changed its accounting system (though it was not an ABC implementation). Though he did not submit the study to a deep theoretical analysis he observed what many others reported later: (1) the importance of a top management sponsor - in this case the absence of one and associated lack of progress;(2) the stimulating role of crisis in developing new information systems: and (3) the difficulty of dislodging an ―embedded‖ cost system resistance to change. While none of these discoveries were startling they are the beginning of a fairly consistent picture of ABC implementation that arises in later studies. It is also one of the few studies that peers into a relative ―failure‖.

Anderson (1995) performed a very thorough case study of ABC implementation at General Motors. She used interviews, archives, and direct observation to track the implementation over a period of several years. Her approach was to follow the case study

methods proposed by Mintzberg(1979) and Eisenhardt(1989) in which she began the study with a ―well-defined research focus‖ using the existing literature on ABC to pick variables. The theoretical framework was based on Kwon and Zmud (1987) and Cooperand Zmud (1990). In this view, the success of implementations depends both on stages of the implementation, as well as on factors that determine progress within each stage. This model is based largely on studies of implementations of information technology projects (which have been studied much more thoroughly than accounting implementations) and on the organizational change literature.

The GM story was more ―successful‖ than not. As Anderson left the theater, ABC had become corporate policy and had begun to branch out beyond its initial uses in product costing to ―activity-based management‖, where operational improvements are sought on that basis of the ABC principles. Nevertheless, the system had not yet proceeded beyond the fourth of the six stages, and there were still difficulties that threatened to curb full acceptance and the full scope of possibilities.

Anderson found that the ―stage‖ model fitted GMs experience quite well. It seems clear that almost any set of events can be fitted to this model that identifies for example the first stage as the ―initiation‖ stage. Thus the study is not so much a test of a theory as a careful account analyzed according to the organizing principle of a ―change model‖. Similarly, the general category of ―factors‖ in Kwon and Zmud(1987) are broad enough to encompass almost anything: the categories are individual organizational technological task characteristics and external environment.

She draws many conclusions; a few seem particularly important. (1) Individual factors - things like sponsorship -are important in the early stages, but organizational factors - Like ―routines to promote efficiency‖ - become dominant in later stages. Organizational factors are probably even more important at GM, where there were over

100 ABC sites than in smaller organizations.(2) There were significant technological hurdles to be cleared - the challenges at GM extended far beyond the ―resistance to change‖ that might meet a change in say a bonus formula. There were two criteria that GM set early on: that the system be broadly applicable to many different processes and that it result in better decision-making. (3) She found very strong sentiment that the ABC system should reside not in accounting but in manufacturing and that knowledge of the production process is very important to success. In some cases process knowledge was a criterion for team membership in others accountants were excluded from teams in the belief that they could not approach the problem with a ―clean slate‖.

Source : Frederick WLindahl . Human Resource Planning, 1997, Vol.20 Issue 2, 62-66.

二、翻译文章

译文：

作业成本法的实施和适应性

摘要

在过去十年里作业成本法进行了深入的研究，与此同时，作业成本法这个题材受到了大量技术和理论角度的关注，而关于实际运用经验的研究却很少。如果作业成本法要成为一个重要的补充管理实践，它的理论必须被转换成成功的实践经验。这个调查报告研究的范围理论适用于组织理论对 ABC 实施的话题的变革。它发现这个领域研究的不足之处，并提出新的研究建议。

引言

在整个过程的最后十年里一种被称为―作业成本法‖(ABC)的管理工具成为一种被更广泛接受的新管理方法。虽然它的核心在于成本核算，但它吸引了一般的业务经理的关注，而且还成为了《哈佛商业评论》中―财富‖和其他商业出版社中各文章的主题。它不仅是出版社的重大主题业务，它还被部分政府部门所采用，例如，国税局和国防部。

作业成本法成为―会计‖领域中的一部分，已经影响到从生产到销售的每一个组织方面。早期关于作业成本法的文学作品，重点主要集中于内在的概念——即埃森的―理论发展‖，它是理论的开始，一提出就产生了深远的影响。例如它提出的重塑绩效评估措施就反映了新制度经济学的基础知识。而这些基本理论的延伸开始逐渐影响组织，学术研究人员开始意识到作业成本法的实施性问题。这又反过来加深了作业成本文学对组织的影响。本文研究的就是这部分加深了的作业成本对组织影响的文学。

本文的焦点是有一定理论基础的―组织变革‖文学。我不会试图全面大量的研究教学案例也不会确认作业成本法在公司中的账户装置是否沿着文学论文《国防部环境休斯飞机公司为ABC设置的标准》 (Haedicke1991 年 8 月初版 )这条路线。这些案件和描述可以提供更丰富的领域，从而对更多的―学术‖论文产生重要的影响，并以此检查它们的正确性。但这种研究仅仅局限于作业成本法的理论方面。虽然会有很多共同的经验，并且可能从全面质量管理（Jensen和Wruck 1994 或Klein，1989）实现中得出结论，但我不打算对理论研究进行展开。

最后，我意识到对作业成本法的研究是非常的新颖的。只有在 1990 年左右实施的严格的作业成本法才属于我们研究的范围。此外还有一些人如Hopwood，1983 认为在整个范畴中研究会计工作是不会有成果的。这一段是介绍作业成本法的理论的，第二部分是回顾最后一部分是得出结论。

讨论

这个部分主要概括了作业成本法的基本思想，并且论述了这个基础思想是如何传播到其他管理领域中的。成本核算的明确目标始终是运用会计系统分配给产品的每一分钱都能合理地反映在生产产品（不管是产品还是服务）的实际损耗价值。有一些资源的分配是很简单的，很容易理解；而也有一些资源很难分配，比如那些相互联系，又难以区分开来的与最终单位产品之间的间接费用。

最近几年中，分配间接费用的难度大大地增强了。因为：（1）间接成本在总成本中的比重在上升；例如，自动化使得机器生产的间接人工代替了（比较容易分配的）直接人工；（2）由于生产产品的型号和类型在不断的增多，使得企业要在复杂的生产调度中尽量能够保持零库存，从而增加了间接成本；（3）分配直接成本、直接人工的传统基础方法的运用减少，从而导致了制造企业需要更好的成本分配方法。作业成本法的关键思想是：作业消耗成本；产品不消耗成本。作业成本法是用来说明间接成本和消耗间接成本的作业之间的联系。一旦运用了作业成本法，产品成本不过是各个作业耗费成本的总和。这样作业成本法的实施就可以解决产品

成本计算的难题，而且经过改进后计算的产品成本可以直接影响产品在市场上的销售：当一个更加可靠的成本系统计算出来的成本远小于它的收益时，该产品的销售方式就应该改变了，就可以重新定价或改变产品促销策略等。

在操作领域里，作业成本法的基本思想表明产品管理者不能控制成本，但他们可以控制产生成本的作业。这意味着作业成本法可以而且应该更多地用于衡量成本；作业成本法可以被积极地用于控制成本。在其他方面的使用中，作业成本法已经被用于估计没有价值增加的作业成本来改善质量（Mac Arther1992）。这个对成本管理延伸的作业成本法被叫做―作业成本管理‖。作业成本管理在销售方面的影响超过了在制造业中的影响。回到销售产品的市场上，依据―作业消耗成本‖的基本思想来分析销售成本，就会使成本分配变得很清晰，就像制造过程一样具有一定的顺序性（Foster1996）。荷兰飞利浦 NV 公司在它的商业部门中的管理部中实施对个人产品的分析，尤其是检查控制成本的作业（Groot1997）。这个方案实施后，使得公司改进了以往的成本分配方法，从而减少了生产部门和管理部门人事成本。

作业成本的―思维‖质疑传统的绩效衡量。如果新的―作业‖分析需要与以往传统方法有不同的侧重点，那么管理者应该朝着新的侧重点去进行绩效衡量。此外，随着作业成本法新的“思维”的运用，传统的成本预算变得令人怀疑——因为传统的预算使得以往被用作年初预算基础的作业，比上一年年初预算成本增加了5%。同时作业成本思想的标准也影响了设计的标准：产品设计师只要拥有关于作业制造成本信息就可以设计一个制造成本最少的产品（Berlant，1990）。

这样的列子举不胜举。但从中可以看到一个共同点：作业成本法是通过组织影响行为的一个工具。它改变了原来分配成本的套路，修改了性能和补偿标准，它具有重要的行为后果。但是这并不令人意外，不是每一个想享受更好成本计算好处的企业都可以心想事成。因为存在一个选择性偏好，使得学会失败比学会成功更难，但是虽然如此，仍有充分的证据表明其实那些缓慢的、停滞不前的作业成本法和具

有重要进展的作业成本法是一样的。这是在研究实施过程中得到的，作业成本法范围中存在的现象。

作业成本法没有完全得到认同。有一个权威性的人口组织相信分析成本可以为企业带来效益。看来连组织都采用了作业成本法。它很可能是一种新型的研究财务分析的工具。但它并没有取代创建财务报告的传统会计系统。作业成本法使用了很多产品定价方法，并且它不依赖于信息的及时性，所以它可以被充分地利用，甚至连没有进行过整理的成本核算体系也可以使用作业成本法。尽管作业成本法系统缺少了一个转换的功能，但它的思想依然产生了深远的影响，而且在组织运用过程中影响着政策的制定。

调查

Bruns(1987)在一家公司中实施了一个早期的，详细的实验研究，但它并不算是一个作业成本法的实施按列。因为他没有提交深入的理论研究分析，他只是在研究了其他人的报告后得出了结论：(1)高层管理赞助者所体现的重要性——在这种情况下，某一个赞助者的退出都会影响到相关工作的进展；(2)危机的出现对新的成本系统的发展起到了促进作用；(3)摈弃一个传统的成本系统的困难性(即在变革中存在巨大地阻力)。这些结论，并不让人觉得有什么特别的地方，但他们却是以后的研究作业成本法实施的基础。这些研究相对于以后研究的成果来说是一个“失败”的例子。

Anderson(1995)在通用汽车公司实施了一个非常周密的作业成本法实施的案例研究。她用访谈，档案分析和直接观察等方法来分析数年间作业成本法的实施情况。她运用的方法就是按照Mintzberg(1979)和Eisenhardt(1989)提出的案例研究方法，她使用了目前的作业成本法来选择变量，以明确研究的重点。她使用的理论框架是以Kwon和Zmud(1987)以及Cooper和Zmud(1990)的研究为基础的。在这种理论观点下，想要成功的实施作业成本法就必须确定实施阶段以及明确影响每个阶段

的因素；想要成功地建立作业成本法的模型就必须依赖于研究组织变更方面的信息技术项目。

通用汽车的实例所获得成功的经验有很多。当Anderson离开通用汽车公司后，作业成本法已经成为了公司的政策，并开始运用到各个方面。作业成本法在企业中的运用超过了传统用于“作业成本管理”的产品成本计算方法。不过，这个成本系统的运用还没有超出整个阶段的四分之一，并且仍然存在着许多困难，不能是作业成本法被完全接受，因而它也得不到充分的运用。

Anderson发现在美国通用汽车公司运用的“阶段”模型很好。他认为几乎所有的事件集合都可以并且适合做这个识别模型，而且它的第一阶段就为“开始”阶段。所以，在通用汽车公司的研究不仅仅是一个适用于“改变模式”的组织系统的成本理论分析。它里面关于Kwon和Zwud(1987)提出的“因素”范围就已经很广泛了，足以涵盖几乎所有的东西：包括个人，组织，技术，任务特点和外部环境等等。

她得出了很多结论，有几个显得尤为重要。（1）个人因素——比如说赞助的事情，在早期阶段就非常的重要，而组织因素——像促进效率的程序，在以后阶段就成为了主导。在通用汽车公司组织因素在大的组织机构中显得更为重要，因为那里有超过了100个作业成本网站。(2)解决的重大的技术障碍在通用汽车的难度远远超过了预期的“变革的阻力”，例如说，奖金的标准就有两个。在通用汽车公司成立的早期，该系统可以被广泛地运用到很多不同的流程，并得到了很好的功效，有利于管理者进行决策。所以她觉得作业成本系统应该被保留下来，不仅仅在会计领域，还可以在生产方面，而且生产过程中的运用更能得到好的效益。在运用过程中还要讲究的是团队成员的配合，有一些国家将会计师排除在团队之外，因为他们认为会计师自身存在“避嫌”的问题。

出处：弗雷德里克. 人力资源规划， 1997年，第20卷第2期，62-66