Quality, cost and delivery performance indicators and activity-based costing

This paper addresses an important issue -the nature of and evidence for success in the transfer costing of internal or shared services and products within a company. The case of Activity-Based Costing (ABC) is used to explore how the proponents have developed a framework linking Quality, Cost and Delivery (QCD) components of products and services. The QCD performance indicators, which are the natural properties of products and services, will form part of the Service Level Agreements between the internal service providers (Shared Services Centers) and internal customers (Profit Centers) of the company. This framework optimizes the use of overhead expenses to the end products of the company. This paper also discusses the various cost components of the products and services using the full absorption costing principle. It is a revolutionary idea in the sense that all activity costs are considered variable costs and product costs come from activity costs using various cost drivers. © 2010 IEEE