An Activity-Based Costing Method to Support Product Family Design

As companies are being challenged to produce a wider variety of products to satisfy customers that have different needs while maintaining competitive prices, platform-based product family development has become a cost-effective method for reducing production costs (Roberson and Ulrich, 1998). In general, production costs are generated by production activities ranging from purchasing raw materials to distributing finished products, and those activities consume direct and indirect resources (Horngren, et al., 2000). These costs are identified and collected through management accounting systems that companies have developed for accounting purposes and used to estimate the production costs of existing products. However, many management accounting systems are incapable of providing the necessary information to support platform-based product development because many companies have developed their own accounting systems to help them remain profitable and eliminate unnecessary costs in production. In many cases, the primary objective of management accounting systems is to support management to control overall equipment efficiency (OEE) and keep it as high as possible.