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ABC in restaurants
ABC is one of the most important innovations in the field of cost and management accounting (Bjornenak and Mitchell, 1999;Bjornenak, 1997). ABC systems use a two‐stage approach that is similar to the structure of traditional cost systems, such as job order costing and process costing. Traditional costing systems use actual departments or cost centres for accumulating and redistributing costs, while ABC systems use activities for this purpose. Thus, instead of asking how to allocate a service department expense to a production department, the ABC system designer requests a list of performed activities by the service department's resources. The resource expenses are assigned on the one hand to the number of required activities and on the other hand on the former's usage to perform these activities (Atkinson et al., 2001; Garrison and Noreen, 2000).
The usefulness of ABC in the financial performance of firms has been explored in the literature. Cagwin and Bouwman (2002) use confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling to investigate whether the use of ABC is associated with improved financial performance. Results show that:
[…] there is a positive association between ABC and improvement in ROI when ABC is used concurrently with other strategic initiatives, when implemented in complex and diverse firms, when used in environments where costs are relatively important, and when there are limited numbers of intra‐company transactions (Cagwin and Bouwman, 2002).
To this end Kaplan and Cooper (1998) suggest that service companies are ideal candidates for ABC. One reason for this is that in the services industry a great percentage of total cost is labour cost and processes are highly variant (Kostakis et al., 2008). Studies have shown the possible use and potential benefits of ABC in THE HOTEL industry (Kostakis et al., 2011; Berts and Kock, 1995;Noone and Griffin, 1999). New techniques assisting large‐scale ABC implementation have also been developed in recent years (Kaplan and Anderson, 2004).
The restaurant industry is facing great challenges today, mainly due to the highly competitive environment and the diverse needs of the customers. Restaurants have to achieve a balance between serving these needs, and pricing their menu items to achieve adequate profitability levels (Raab et al., 2009). Traditional costing systems and simplistic pricing approaches were very popular within the restaurant industry. Overhead cost and operating expenses were usually excluded and prices were a function of food cost, as well as customer demand, historical prices and other factors. This method has the evident disadvantage of leading to misleading information about individual menu items. Research has revealed the significance of labour and energy costs in restaurants (Chan and Au, 1998). This study also revealed that restaurants are labour intensive with labour cost representing a great share of total operating cost.
Although restaurant managers usually are able to monitor their customer's needs, a study conducted by Raab and Mayer (2003)shows that most of them do not know the true profitability of their various menu items. This study also reveals that although some restaurant managers trace a portion of undistributed operating costs to their menus, the restaurant industry in general does not allocate overhead costs to menu items.
Studies in cost and management accounting in the restaurant industry demonstrate the potential benefits of the use of ABC in their operations. Raab et al. (2005) applied an adapted ABC model developed by Cooper (1989) in a buffet‐style restaurant in HONG KONG . ABC was able to gain insights about the operating profit margins of individual menu items. ABC has also been applied to a major quick service restaurant chain (Annaraud et al., 2008). A study conducted by Raab and Mayer (2007) combines ME with ABC in restaurants, using direct observation to calculate the percentage of time an employee spends on an activity, whileRaab et al. (2009) incorporate PF analysis to compare traditional ME approach (contribution margin‐CM based) with ME and ABC (ABC/ME) approach. This model also used observation as means of allocating labour cost to individual menu items. Recent studies provide empirical evidence of the current general trends regarding the practical consideration, adoption, and use of ABC in the hospitality industry (Pavlatos and Paggios, 2009).
The presented methodology aims at overcoming the drawbacks of using observation and similar methods of estimating cost drivers to allocate operating cost to menu items, thus attempting more accurate cost estimation in the restaurant industry. Given that some cost drivers are difficult to calculate, even when observation techniques are employed, this study demonstrates a new method that allows the user to calculate all cost drivers that are included in an ABC model.
Methods for estimating cost drivers
ABC is a methodology used to allocate overhead costs effectively. Dunn and Brooks (1990) and Noon and Griffin (1999) discuss the steps involved in the design of ABC systems in HOTELS : identifying activities, assigning costs‐to‐cost pools, selecting appropriate cost drivers for assessing the cost of activities to cost objects and assigning the cost of the activities to services and to customers. Thus, ABC is a two‐stage approach. In the first phase, resource costs are mapped to activities through resource cost drivers, taking into consideration the resources required by each performed activity. In the second phase, activity costs are mapped to the cost objects that use these activities, by means of activity cost drivers. During the two stages of the aforementioned methodology, relevant data might not be available.
One such example is the time spent by employees in performing various activities. These data include the level of every activity's usage within the production sector of the final products, and/or services and needs to be estimated (Wieserma, 1995). The restaurant industry numbers hundreds of activities, such as setup, cleaning, cooking, taking orders, etc. Defining the appropriate cost drivers and calculating them accurately is essential, in order to achieve high accuracy of total cost. To deal with the problem of lack of data, three levels of data accuracy can be used to estimate the proportions and levels stated above: educated guess, systematic appraisal and collection of real data.
When real data are not available and cannot be obtained or when they are very expensive to obtain, the method of educated guess is used. This method uses experts' opinions to gather data, which are then put together to form estimates. Clearly, the method of educated guess is time‐effective. However, as Anderson and Kaplan (2007) point out a subtle and serious problem arises from the interview and survey process itself. They suggested that when people estimate how much time they spent on a list of activities, they report percentages that add up to 100 percent and do not record much idle or unused time. Therefore, almost all ABC systems calculate cost driver rates assuming that resources work at full capacity, making cost estimates less accurate. Second, the systematic appraisal method uses quantitative approaches to obtain proportions, such as analytic hierarchical processing. This method offers a higher degree of accuracy. However, personnel with analytical skills and specialised computer software are needed; moreover, the method requires much computational time. Finally, the actual data collection (ADC) method requires systematic data sampling, followed by analysis of data using statistical methods. The main drawback of this method is the high cost associated with its implementation.
This study aims at overcoming the drawbacks of the three methods of estimating cost drivers, by introducing a new model based on the integration of discrete‐event simulation and ARM in an ABC context in restaurants. The method can be proved particularly useful, as it models process variability through the simulation of cost drivers. Moreover, it uses data mining to extract associations between cost drivers that are easy to estimate and cost drivers that are either difficult or time consuming to estimate. The association rules will lead to the estimation of the values of the cost drivers that were difficult to calculate before. The proposed methodology complements the three methods of estimating cost drivers, namely educated guess, systematic appraisal and ADC, rather that substituting them.
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