TDABC for a manufacturing environment: A case study

Abstract Costing system is an essential part of a company. Determining the accurate cost of a product or service is extremely important for the profitability and performance of a company. Over the years, different approaches and models have been developed to estimate the cost of the product manufactured. However, their models were found to be inadequate in the correct value of the product cost. In the last decade, activity-based costing (ABC) has been successfully adopted by many companies worldwide. Nonetheless, because of its high maintenance and setup cost, it has been abandoned and a new time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) model has been developed. Though adopted by many large scale-manufacturing industries, TDABC has not been implemented in small scale manufacturing companies due to unavailability of resources and also ignorance about its implementation. This paper presents a model for the application of TDABC in the small scale manufacturing industry. The model is implemented in a furniture manufacturing company for the estimation of product cost. The cost obtained from the TDABC is compared with the traditional costing system and established the accuracy of TDABC over the traditional costing system. Along with the case study, this paper also discusses the different data results obtained from TDABC and its utility for the managers and the decision makers.