Final Exam (Part B) Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Question 1

The identification and analysis of the five topics from the course and their applications to businesses are described in detail as follows:

Activity Based Costing

The desire of most of the organizations to understand the behavior of their costs and the drivers of these costs has been growing rapidly over the past several years. However, there has been great confusion within this organization on understanding the different types of costs in different organizations and how to differentiate between the different types of competing cost measurement technologies such as throughput accounting, standard costing or activity based costing. As a result, most of the managers are confused regarding which are the correct costs and what are the true drivers of these relative costs.

Therefore, in order to remain competitive in the business world, organizations today need to understand and be able to analyze the complete cost information of their organizations. Most of the organizations have been using the traditional costing systems, however, these costing systems resulted in a lack of visibility of the indirect costs and as a result, most of the organizations today have started to adopt activity based costing systems (Stiles & Micks, 1997).

This costing system is based on a cost modeling which accounts for the direct as well as the indirect costs of all the services, customers, products and the channels of the organization through which, the costs are incurred. Being a CEO or owner of a health company, we analyze the importance of ABC in healthcare companies. Spending on healthcare and the care of the elderly through the nursing homes in western countries such as Ireland, has been under increased scrutiny.

Final Exam (Part B) Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

There has been a constant pressure from the government of the counties to manage the costs of these nursing homes especially in the time of fiscal restraint. Funding for the healthcare now accounts for a total of one third of the provincial expenditures and a significant portion of this funding is allocated to the funding of the nursing homes in Ireland. The government of Ireland has been taking all the steps to control the costs of healthcare. Organizations have also initiated internal cost measures (Shuneman, 1997).

The literature suggests that the management of the internal cost measures comes from the management of the cost drivers of these nursing homes and other healthcare organizations (Asadi & Batz, 1996). These cost drivers are the actual factors which are thought to be the actual drivers of the cost and they also have a strong relationship with the actual costs of the organization. If we assess the costs within a nursing home, then the assessment of the costs would be linked with the resource requirements, care activities undertaken for the elderly and the resident care planning.

The implementation of the ABC costing system within the healthcare companies can be presented in two stages, first one would be a conceptual approach and the second one would be ABC analysis cost driver identification and total cost analysis. The first stage relates to just categorizing and defining all sorts of care activities which are undertaken within the organization.............

This is just a sample partical work. Please place the order on the website to get your own originally done case solution.