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Building an Activity Based Costing Solution

Presenter: Heron Jayawardena

Supervisor: Gary Lau (Macquarie Analytics)

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Agenda• Project Background• Project Purpose• Business Problem• Solution Design

- Architecture, Approach, Technologies• Demo• Benefits• Limitations• Future Work• Questions

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Project Background

What is ABC?

Is A Management Accounting Approach

Which Allocate all Direct and Indirect costs

To Cost objects (products and services)

To Help management understand critical business information

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Project Background -- continued

• Currently there are varieties of ABC approaches and models in place across the Macquarie University  FBE uses spread sheets FoS uses their own system (PHP, MySql)

• Activities for this project - Academic Activities Teaching Research Services

FBE Model

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Project Purpose

Develop a web based data collection and reporting capability for ABC

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Business Problem

1. Every faculty has their own methodology

2. No common terminology across the faculties

3. Reporting - Data stored in different locations/formats

Solution Design - Architecture

Collection

Data

Report

Data

Data Model

Cube

End User Layer:

Browser Form

Reports

Finance HR Time Table

Data Bank

Data

Cost Pools

Cost Objects

Allocate

ABC (On Virtual Server)

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Solution Design – Approach

1. Obtain data sets (OFS, HR, Unit Bank..etc)

2. Analyse data sets

3. Load data in to the Databank (Analytics)

4. Create data cubes to load the acquired data

5. Design web forms to capture academic activities

6. Build ABC reports

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Solution Design - Technologies

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Demo

Personae:

1. Academic Staff – entering data & review

2. Faculty General Manager – reviewing faculty reports

Individual Academic Input

Teaching Activity Input - 1

Teaching Activity Input - 2

Research Activity Input

Service Activity Input

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Reports

Individual Summary Report

Faculty Summary Drill-Down Report - 1

Faculty Summary Drill-Down Report - 2

Faculty Summary Drill-Down Report - 3

Faculty Summary Drill-Down Report - 4

Faculty Cost Drill-Down Report

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Benefits

Provide a common base for ABC

Data collection & Reporting for ABC

Academic Workload Planning (AWP)

Academic PDR

Meet Macquarie's operational & strategic targets

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Limitations

• Review is done only on two faculties

• Limited feedback and user acceptance testing

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Future Work

• Automate ABC as much as possible to reduce OFS workload.

• Standardise data capturing from other sources.

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Questions

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Thank You