"Business leaders are always being presented with proposals to 'improve' corporate performance. Cokins turns ABC/M into an objective tool for forecasting the actual costs in an improved environment. Every executive should follow Gary's methods to predict benefits before risking company and career on a multimillion-dollar program."--Hugh D. Pinkus, Executive Consultant, Industrial Sector, Business Innovation Services, IBM Global Services
"Gary Cokins advances Activity-Based Cost Management the next step. In addition to providing the roadmap for ABC/M implementation success, Gary reveals the real strategic applications of ABC/M."--Joe Kosinski, Director, Corporate Manufacturing Accounting, Abbott Laboratories
"ABC/M is lucky to have Gary Cokins as its advocate. Gary has the gift to take the concept that many view as complex and reduce it to its simplest terms, and he has done so again here. After reading this book, you will have an understanding of the power of ABC/M as a tool to understand costs and make better business decisions."--John F. Morrow, CPA, AICPA Vice President, The New Finance
"Gary Cokins has helped light the way for cost and profitability analysis practitioners for many years. His wit and vivid metaphors engage a broad audience of managers and executives, helping generate not only new levels of understanding but also genuine enthusiasm for applying 'accounting' tools to improve bottom-line performance."--Tim Jordheim, Manager, ABC/M Center of Expertise, Cargill, Inc.
"Making sense of complex end-to-end business processes can hinder timely and substantive improvements. This thorough and engaging book shows how processes can be reduced to activity-level building blocks where resource consumption relationships can be identified and evaluated. Insights gained from these evaluations can then be used to motivate and prioritize changes that bring actual process-related costs into balance with other organizational goals such as productivity, cycle time, quality, and customer satisfaction."--Hal Thilmony, Senior Manager, Financial Business Process Improvement, Cisco Systems
About the Author
Gary Cokins is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in advanced cost management and performance improvement systems. He is the founder of Analytics-Based Performance Management, an advisory firm located in Cary, North Carolina. . Gary received a BS degree with honors (Tau Beta Pi) in Industrial Engineering/Operations Research from Cornell University in 1971. He was two year varsity football letterman. He received his MBA with honors (Beta Gamma Sigma) from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in 1974. Gary began his career as a strategic planner with FMC’s Link-Belt Division and then served as Financial Controller and Operations Manager. In 1981 Gary began his management consulting career first with Deloitte Consulting Next with KPMG, Gary was trained on activity-based costing (ABC) by Harvard Business School Professors Robert S. Kaplan and Robin Cooper. With KPMG working with Dr. David Norton, Gary was also involved with initial research that led to the development of the Balanced Scorecard. Prior to joining SAS, Gary headed the National Cost Management Consulting Services for Electronic Data Systems (EDS), now part of HP. From 1997 until recently Gary was in business development with SAS, a leading provider of enterprise performance management and business analytics and intelligence software. Gary resides with his wife Pam in Cary, North Carolina.
