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The book is a history of the birth and construction of the telescope. It is the only popular acccount, and as such is an important source of information for anyone wanting to know about this trail-blazing telescope.
The book is a logical sequential account of the birth of the telescope. The writing suffers a little by being shared between three authors, some of whom are more accessible than others; but this is a minor quibble in what is otherwise an authoritative account of an important instrument.
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If you are interested in learning more about Activity-Based Costing, this book is not the best choice for you. Professor Kaplan has co-authored books that explore this subject in much greater detail.
Most people set as their initial priority the need to have accurate financial reporting for the entire enterprise. Falling below that level of effectiveness is Stage I in the terms of this book. Once you have that financial reporting done accurately, you are at Stage II. But you know almost nothing about how to manage your costs better. In order to do that, you will need to establish ad hoc financial reporting processes designed to help your organization learn from its experience and identify opportunities for improvement, built around Activity-Based Costing (ABC). ABC is simply a way of more accurately applying overhead costs back to activities and then processes that permits accurately understanding more about which combinations of products and services and customers are profitable and which are not. Then, within each activity, you can also see the inefficiencies in what you are doing that present opportunities for improvement. The book also has a nice discussion of Kaizen costing that is widely used in Japanese companies looking for on-going cost improvements, based on Professor Cooper's research. There are a few case histories to illustrate the principles, but most will find these insufficient to guide them through the process. In other books, Professor Kaplan has pointed out that there is a lot of acquired art in the subject and you probably need help to get it right. I concur. Once you have ABC operating in stand-alone systems, you are at Stage III.
At this point, you will have a financial reporting system that is separate from the ABC system. How do you put them together? That the subject of chapter 14, which is the key value-added part of this book. You will see what the systems architecture and process flow needs to be in order to combine ABC with Enterprise-Wide Systems (EWS) of the sort that many large companies have invested in during recent years. Putting the two together will greatly improve planning, budgeting, design of new products and services, and operational improvements. Chapter 15 expands into the area of how to apply the combined system to budgeting and transfer pricing. Combing ABC and EWS puts you at Stage IV, a level rarely reached today.
The book's main message is that it's a mistake to try to go from Stage II directly to Stage IV. There's a lot of experimentation and mistakes that you can benefit from in an extended Stage III. I agree again, based on my experience with ABC.
The one caution you should have about ABC in this context is that if you are going to radically change your business model every 2-5 years as many companies are, Stage IV is probably unattainable and undesirable. You can't hold back business model innovation for better cost systems. The next business model innovation will probably give you better costs than tweaking the current business model with ABC will.
Seek out the fastest route to progress, and do more of it!
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"Now enterprise resource planning systems promise to integrate operational-control and activity-based cost systems and, by delivering on-line, real-time information, release managers from their normal one-month accounting cycles." But first managers need to understand that both cost systems have fundamentally different purposes and are separate for good reasons. The operational-control system provides information about process and business-unit efficiencies, the activity-based cost systems provides strategic cost information about the underlying economics of the business. The authors use tables and graphs to explain the differences between the two systems. They also explain the possibilities for integration between the systems: (1) Linking ABC to operational control = activity-based budgeting; (2) linking operational control to ABC; and (3) linking ABC and operational control to financial reporting. The authors conclude that the main impact of these integrated enterprise systems is that it promises to increase the relevance and contribution of managerial accounting: "In this way, virtually all organizational expenses become variable and subject to management's control."
Great article by the inventors of activity-based costing ('One Cost System Isn't Enough', 1988; 'Measure Costs Right: Make the Right Decisions', 1988; 'Profit Priorities from Activity-Based Costing', 1991). This article follows the natural evolution of enterprise systems and discusses the impact the integration of operational-control and ABC-systems has on managerial decision-making. Useful article for MBA-students and for people using ERP-systems. I also recommend Thomas H. Davenport's article 'Putting the Enterprise into the Enterprise System' (HBR, July-August 1998). The authors use simple US-English.
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J. Edgar Hoover: He was the best counterintelligence director since George Washington's extensive intelligence organization during the Revolutionary War! One of the most interesting facts to emerge is the revelation last year that J. Edgar had an agent at the top level of the Soviet Government. He deserves a lot of credit, which he will never get from the radical left media in the US.
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