Competitive Cost-Based Pricing Systems for Modern Manufacturing

Publisher Marketing: In an era of fierce international competition, manufacturing firms must have a thorough understanding of their cost structure and how that structure relates to pricing and product mix decisions. Two competing conceptual approaches to designing product cost systems that support decision making are activity-based costing and the theory of constraints. Rather than argue in favour of one to the exclusion of the other, Robert J. Campbell presents a new approach to cost system design that combines the strengths of each school of thought, thereby overcoming the significant limitations of each. The need to price the product mix in order to exploit constrained resources is advocated by the theory of constraints, while the need to examine resource consumption from activities, both value adding and non-value adding, to support the principles of JIT is advocated by activity-based costing.

Contributor Bio:  Campbell, Robert J ROBERT J. CAMPBELL is a Professor of Accountancy at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He has served as a consultant with a number of manufacturing firms and has published in journals such as Management Accounting, Journal of Cost Management, the CPA Journal, and Internal Auditing. One of his articles, "Strategic Pricing in the Automative Glass Industry" is currently used by the Goldratt Institute in its national Executive Decision Making training workshops.