The acquisition and elimination of products and the resources needed to create them constitutes an important part of the business decision-making process. Activity-based costing (ABC) supports this process by providing a tool for evaluating the relative profitability of various products. It accomplishes this by allocating costs to products based on the activities, and in turn the resources demanded by those activities, required to produce them. In allocating indirect costs traditionally considered "fixed," such as equipment, administrative overhead, and support staff salaries, ABC treats all costs as variable in the long-run. However, many costs can only vary in discrete steps. For example, one usually cannot purchase a fractional piece of equipment; one chooses either to buy it or not to buy it. Also, in adding support staff, one will typically find that people demand full-time positions, so increments will come in discrete amounts. This stairstep semivariable nature of many costs runs counter to ABC's treatment of all costs as variable. In addition, different products often draw upon the same resources. This creates complex interactions, making it difficult to predict the ultimate consequences of adding or eliminating a particular product. Mixed integer programming (MIP) provides another tool for making these product/resource mix decisions. Unlike ABC, however, it can handle variables that take on integer values, and hence deal appropriately with stairstep semivariable costs. It also ensures that the decision recommended by the model will optimize profitability, given that a solution exists and the underlying assumptions hold true. In doing this, MIP automatically adjusts for all of the complex interactions that exist among the various products and resources. Using a simplified two product/two resource model, one can detail the mathematics behind ABC and MIP, and then link the two approaches through a common variable. This allows one to establish the conditions under which ABC and MIP will yield the same results, and those under which they will differ. Since MW produces an optimal solution, the fact that ABC yields a different result under specific circumstances underscores the danger of relying solely on the product margins generated by an ABC model. / Graduation date: 1998

According to Michael Porter¡¦s Competitive Advantage, only through Value Chain Analysis, a company can realize it¡¦s cost behavior and the resources needed for differentiation. Thus the company can optimize its resources usage and increase it¡¦s business activities¡¦ performance. With the Internet environment, economic value for a company is nothing more than the gap between price and cost, and it is reliably measured only by sustained profitability. In e-retailing, e-retailers that want to reach competitive advantage and high economic value must consider how to create real margins, how to measure and manage the cost of e-retailing activities, and execute it in a efficient way to enhance e-retailer¡¦s competitive advantage. This research applies Activity-Based Costing approach to confer e-retailing activities. Value chain analysis is first employed to explore the primary activities of e-retailing. Then the improvement of cost and process are sought from activity analysis, resource cost driver and process cost driver. Finally, the critical e-retailing activities result from the internal value chain analysis. The research results indicated that the price of product and the characteristic of product have different influence on e-retailing activities. In addition, e-retailer want sustained profitability, the finite resource must provide for the customer and product that contribute to e-retailer¡¦s sustained profitability. Finally, the research also indicated that the link of marketing/sales activities and customer service activities are the most critical e-retailing activities. Keyword¡Gvalue chain, e-retailing activities, Activity Based Costing

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Lisa Eckel, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Psychology. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 7, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

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This study aims to examine the characteristics of activity-based costing (ABC) in Thailand and to compere the important aspects of ABC in Thailand, as a developing country, to those in the UK, the US and Australia, as developed countries. / Thesis (PhDBusinessAdministration)--University of South Australia, 2007.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Illinois State University, 1998. / Title from title page screen, viewed July 13, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Elizabeth T. Lugg (chair), Robert Arnold, John R. McCarthy, Rodney P. Riegle. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-75) and abstract. Also available in print.

No description available.

This study sets out to prove that Activity-Based Management is still a relevant instrument to facilitate effective management decision-making and organisational improvement. In the light of all the latest techniques and methodologies that currently exist to measure and rectify organisational performance, the obvious question might be “but why Activity-Based Management?”. Whilst certain techniques and methodologies concentrate on either inputs, outputs and / or on the entire process, Activity-Based Management was selected because it specifically analyses the activities (transformation component) of a business, plus the fact that this methodology has been refined and tested with great success in large organisations such as Eskom. Given the selection of management tools available, an instrument such as Activity-Based Management is usually not implemented alone, but may be supported by one or more other approaches. For this reason, Activity-Based Management is contrasted with several other popular instruments in the literature review. If properly applied, Activity-Based Management can provide management with a sound decision-making platform for correctly aligning resources and work activities. It produces cost information by linking human resource costs to activities and then tracks these human resource costs (inputs) by activity (transformation) and traces them to the point where products and / or services (outputs) reach their destination / customers (result). It also serves as a useful base to improve strategic and operational decisions and for reviewing and updating the organisation structure of a business. This study reworks and researches previous data related to a project carried out by Eskom (exploratory research) with the purpose of testing the primary research objective. Based on a predetermined dictionary of activities and an associated data collection form, a census was used to collect the data. The resulting reports highlight the main obstructions to effective performance and they mainly relate to an imbalance of time expenditure amongst the various activities performed, an outdated organisation structure and a misalignment of effort with the new vision and strategies formulated. The study is concluded with a number of recommendations for improvement and for further study. Briefly, these recommendations address:  shifting the focus from support to core activities and placing a higher emphasis on activities that support the new vision and strategies of the business;  eliminating unnecessary activities and reducing the amount of time wasted; and  eliminating fragmented work, dealing with surplus manpower numbers and revising the organisation structure. / Prof. H.E.C. de Bruyn

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a growing health concern in Canada and around the world, as it currently infects 3% of the global population. While there is no vaccine available against this virus, novel and effective treatment regimens have improved prospects for the cure of HCV. Complications caused by HCV can lead to severe liver disease and even death. The limited viral proteome forces HCV to rely heavily on various host factors for its replication. Additionally HCV modulates the host physiology to facilitate its pathogenesis; consequently, the in dept study of essential host-virus interactions expands our understandingof how the virus and related species commandere host cell machinery. This understanding can help create new therapeutic strategies, which may have applications towards HCV and other related RNA viruses. While numerous studies have demonstrated that HCV modulates the abundance of various host proteins, the systematic study of the virus’s effect on the enzymatic activity has been relatively unexplored. For this reason, activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) was applied to study the changes in the activity of host enzymes during HCV replication. ABPP is a functional proteomics technique that employs active site-directed probe (ABP) to report on the activity of enzymes within complex proteomes, such as living cells. Herein, directed and non-directed ABPs were employed for specific as well as global profiling of the alterations in the activity of cellular enzymes during HCV replication. As a result, essential host enzymes that are differentially active during HCV infection were identified. Furthermore, I have developed a quantitative ABPP method for relative quantification of the cellular enzymes activity during HCV infection. These results contribute to the discovery of disease-associated biomarkers, with diagnostic significance, and aid in the identification of potential targets for therapeutic interventions. In addition to developing protein-based tools to study host-virus interactions, I employed a novel technique to investigate the interactions of micro-RNA 122 (miR-122), an essential HCV host factor, with the viral RNA genome. This in vitro screening approach, interrogates the folding of HCV RNA using viral RNA-coated magnetic bead (VRB) to determine target site accessibility for RNA silencing. This method predicts the relative affinity of small RNAs towards HCV genomic RNA that are not easily predicted by informatic means, and led to discovery of potent miR-122 interaction site within the large, highly-structured HCV RNA genome. For that reason, VRB assay may represent an attractive tool for the examination of target site accessibility for RNA silencing.