The company makes data communication device adopted total quality philosophy to work with suppliers, employees and customers. Financial group finds the current system is outdated costs in connection with the transition from manual to automatic production technology. As part of its improvement, the group is developing activity-based costing system to replace the outdated standard cost system. The new system is used for the inventory value of the financial statements, provides a monthly feedback on the effectiveness of, and to report to the manager about the cost and profitability of their products. It is also used to calculate the target cost that affect the decisions made by product design and development engineers, so that future generations of products can be produced at lower cost. The case allows a discussion of how well the individual functions of these various roles, and compare the value of the company targeted approach to those used by Japanese companies such as Nissan, Komatsu, and Olympus. "Hide
by Robert S. Kaplan Source: Harvard Business School 21 pages. Publication Date: 01 May 1995. Prod. #: 195165-PDF-ENG
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