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Activity-Based Management: Arthur Andersen’s Lessons from the ABM Battlefield Introduction/Preface If you let the enemy focus on the almighty dollar, and you concentrate on time, quality, dollars, pesos, deutsch marks, yen, pounds, francs, etc. who will win the war? Competition is not about making short-term profits, it is about being faster, providing better service, providing high quality products and services, and avoiding costs, and doing all of these in any country. Activity-based management (ABM) is a useful weapon in this war. ABM should be used to determine not only accurate costs of products and services, but also, accurate costs of alternative actions. For example, these actions can include rearranging equipment to produce faster (time based competition), purchasing more costly but higher quality materials to reduce lost sales due to customer goodwill (total quality management), or comparing alternative ways of reengineering a process (business process re-engineering). U.S. organizations have pioneered the development and implementation of ABM. This may be because U.S. managers realized the potential of ABM first or it may be because U.S. organizations are so diverse (in terms of products, services, and people) that they needed ABM more. The pitfalls of ABM, how to overcome those pitfalls, ABM reporting issues, and the diversity of ABM implementations are covered in more depth in this book than in any other publication. This book will help you decide whether or not to implement ABM more effectively, to avoid and minimize the pitfalls of ABM, and help you to use ABM in support of Just-In-Time, time based competitions, total quality management, business process re-engineering, etc. This book is divided into three sections: Section 1 - Pitfalls and How to Overcome Them; Section 2 - Business Implementations of ABM; and Section 3 - Reporting Issues: Asking the Right Questions and Getting the Right Answers. Section 1 includes three articles on lessons from