Incremental progress is better than delayed, or unattained, perfection

This is an old saying that keeps on coming back to my mind every now and then. This is because there are discussions going on Activity Based Costing (ABC) lately. These discussions are happening in person, workshops, networking sites on the Internet. The talks are about the results that it provides and the requirement of data for creating and maintaining the ABC models. It is now well known to the people that having an ABC system would provide a better understanding of the costs and hence the profitability of the products or customers. But at the same time they are worried about the efforts that they have to put to collect the data.

It is true that, this requires some efforts to create the model in your organization, but it is not to the extent that is cannot be managed. Some of the statements are like “Do we have now perform the time study using a stop watch for all the departments?” “Do we have to enter activities for which the expense has happened, like we enter the cost center?” “Do we have to change the chart of accounts?” Actually they are reluctant to do all these things for getting more accurate costs. But to their surprise, when we say it not necessary to do all these things, then people do swing from one extreme to the other. Their feeling is, if we are doing all this, then are we really doing ABC, or are we really going to get more accurate costs?

Let us see what kind of data is required for ABC models. We sill split this into two parts, first the efforts and data for the first time when we are creating the model and then the efforts and data required to maintain the model.

Efforts and data required for the first time –

1) Cost center accounting
2) Activities for the cost centers
3) Time taken by each activity (sustainable and repeatable)
4) Volume of those activities for various departments, products or customers
5) Output quantity or sold quantity

Efforts and data required for maintaining the ABC model –

1) Cost center accounting
2) Volume of the activities for various departments, products or customers
3) Output quantity or sold quantity

Out of all this, the definition of activities and the time taken for the same are the one time efforts. This information does not change unless the organization has really changed their way of working drastically. The new information that is to be collected is the volume of the activities. And I admit that there will be some resistance from the various departments to provide this data. This is not new. When we implemented the ERPs in our organization there was similar type resistance from various departments. For example the purchase department did not have to enter all the taxes in detail. They used to write ‘taxes as applicable’. Now in the ERPs they have to create a detailed ‘pricing schema’ with all the taxes mentioned with their accurate rates. This has to be done for each ‘item-vendor’ combination. Similar was the case for ‘Sales order’ and the sales function. The manufacturing (shop floor) people were not ready to confirm the various steps in ‘routing’ that was created for each part. But ERP (or OLTP) has become an integral part of most of the organization across globe. People have accepted these changes and working according to it. Of course technology has helped them to automate some these.

This was about the quantum of new data that is required. Now we will talk about the accuracy of the data required. This is important as the accuracy of the data decides the availability of the data as well as the efforts to collect the data if available. In the current state of It initiatives in various organizations 80% of the data required regularly is available in the systems running in the organization. The data that is not available generally is the time required to perform an activity and services provided by the internal shared service departments.

Time to complete an activity - To find out the time required to complete the activity does not need ‘time and motion study’, as it is expected by the people. We can find out the time just by observing ourselves for couple of days. We can also point out the variation in the ‘standard time’, reasons and occurrence of the same. Most of the time the variations are there but they are not so frequent. If at all they are frequent we can define them separately.

Volume of activities by internal shared service departments – This is data is generally not required in any MIS and hence not collected. So here the inaccuracy is generally for the initial period of time. Once this data is regularly collected it is available with accuracy. For example, the volume of services provided by the Administration department.

The accuracy of the data can also be increased over a period of time and more importantly if it is required. But if ABC models are generally used for strategic decision making and here the 80% accuracy of the data is good enough. Most of the times the accurate data is not available only because, it is never collected in the fashion that is required by the ABC model. Mere regular collection of data increases the accuracy of the data.

I will give you an example of, how the accuracy of the data was increased in one of the implementations. This is an Insurance organization with a head quarter and lot of branches all over the country. There are multiple channels for acquiring the customer. Multiple processes in which, the policy can be issued like STP (straight through process), non STP non Medical and non STP Medical. Of course, various products to be sold. We started with taking all the branches as one location but calculated the cost of acquisition separately for each type of acquisition channel. This information was very useful for the organization in the initial stage. The next step was to calculate the costs of acquisition, serving, retention and closure product wise. Here we also separated the ‘rework’ from the ‘clean process’, for each of the process. We also found in this way that there are various processes that do not change across the channel or products.

We should not wait for implementing the ABC model just because we do not have the most accurate data with us. We should not also deny ourselves more accurate information just because we do not have the data in our hands today. Because the old saying makes perfect sense here that says, ‘Incremental progress is better than delayed, or unattained, perfection’.