Co-Operative Bank Case

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THE CO-OPERATIVE BANK: CASE ANALYSIS Q1: What new issues, if any, arise when applying analysis to service business? Activity Based Costing (ABC) is a costing method that defines a firm’s activities and then assigns costs or overheads based on those activities. For example in the case, the activities of Co-operative Bank as illustrated in Exhibit 5 are providing ATM services, issuing cheque books, handling customer inquiries etc. Therefore costs incurred by each cost centre or resource pool are allocated on the basis if those activities. By applying activity based costing the bank was able to estimate the cost of an additional service such as financial advice services. To understand the issues surrounding the application of ABC to service organizations, it is important to note the difference between applying ABC to service organizations and manufacturing companies. Firstly, with a manufacturing company, the product costs can be traced easily because a large portion of costs is attributable to direct labor and materials used in the production process. However in a service organization, it is difficult to identify direct costs related to a specific service. This is because services are largely intangible and are directly delivered to customers through employees. Therefore it follows that one way in which the cost of providing a service can be captured, is by giving close estimates of the amount of time spent on delivering a particular service (Hartman, 1998). Despite these challenges ABC offers various benefits to service organizations. For instance, ABC gives upper management the ability to dissect the business based on individual products so that they can evaluate the profitability of each individual service. Furthermore, by identifying activities performed it gives insight into the revenues earned per activity (Ashford, 2011). Basically the information provided

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