Feature Costing Takes Activity Based Costing and Quality to Next Step

Concept of Feature Costing was created by Jim Brimson, project manager of CAM-I who brought us Activity Based Costing in middle 1980s. Jim Brimson has written 5 books on Activity Based Costing ( see Activity Based Costing Books) and taught over 100 seminars on Activity Based Costing, Activity Based Management, and Activity Based Budgeting.

Feature costing focuses on understanding what causes cost to vary before the fact rather than after-the-fact reporting of ABC data. Feature costing focuses on causes of variation. There are 3 major sources of variation:

• Product and services
• Customers
• Failure to execute the process properly

By using quality technique of root cause analysis, organizations can better understand what causes failure to execute a process properly. By focusing on product and customer features, organizations can better understand what causes cost to vary and thus impact profitability before the fact.

• Features A product/service or customer feature is anything that causes an organization to use additional or different tasks in executing a process.
• Characteristics A product/service or customer characteristic is anything that causes more time in executing a business process, activity, or task.

Call or email below Jim Brimson or John Antos at 972-980-7407 to find out how Activity Based Feature Costing can help you reach your goals and give your peace of mind