Application of activity-based costing to a land transportation company: A case study

Although there are many studies in the literature that explain modern costing approaches including activity-based costing (ABC), the number of studies that present real life applications is very few. This is especially true for logistics and transportation applications. One of the main difficulties in land transportation companies is to determine and evaluate true cost of their operations and services. If used and implemented properly, ABC can be very helpful for transportation companies to determine cost of their operations with higher correctness. In this paper, an application of ABC to a land transportation company that is located in Turkey is presented in detail. In order to improve the effectiveness of the ABC an integrated approach that combines ABC with business process modeling and analytical hierarchy approach is proposed. It is figured out that the proposed approach is quite effective in costing services of the land transportation company compared to the existing traditional costing system which is in use.