基于ABC/M的虚拟企业成本控制系统设计

Design of Cost Control System in Virtual Enterprises Based on ABC /M

虚拟企业作为一种企业动态联盟的新型组织形式,具有十分重要的现实应用价值,尤以农业为例,构建农业虚拟企业有利于提高农业的组织化水平,降低农户的市场风险,提升农产品生产效益,有效缓解目前我国农产品价格波动大、农户增收难等现实问题。为此,本文在构建农业虚拟企业的基础上,结合目标成本法,同时针对在虚拟企业目标成本控制过程中呈现的成本盾问题,引入转移价格概念,探索在农业虚拟企业中设计基于ABC/M的成本控制系统。

As a new organizational form of dynamic alliance, virtual enterprise has very significant practical value. Take agriculture as an example, to build agricultural virtual enterprises is beneficial for rising the degree of systematism for agriculture, reducing market risk for farmers and enhancing efficiency of agricultural production. The emergence of agricultural virtue enterprises would effectively alleviate practical issues of price fluctuations for agricultural products and the difficulty of increasing farmers＇ income existing in our country currently. To fully facilitate and maximize the function of a virtue enterprise, the establishment of an effective cost control system is especially crucial. A fully developed cost control system based on activity based costing/management （ABC/M） theories, along with objective costing method,would help all participants in agricultural virtue enterprises better monitor cost in different phases in a timely manner. With such instantaneous data feedback from monitoring procedures,a more comprehensive cost management system is more likely to be achieved. This paper starts with construction of agricultural virtual enterprises, and explores the design of cost control system in agricultural virtual enterprises based on ABC/M with a combination of objective costing method by introducing transfer price concept to solve the problem of cost shield raised from the cost control process of virtual enterprises. Objective costing is an effective cost control method based on market demand that manages the profit prediction and cost control for products with independent manufacturing procedures. When combined with activity based costing system, objective costing would allow a very detailed control of different layers of cost with more accurate cost data input from activity based costing system. However, traditional objective costing method only focuses on cost control of different departments in one enterprise. As a result, such traditional method would not properly cope with ＂cost shield＂ problem that emerges between two virtue enterprises participants. To better address this problem and improve objective costing method for uses in virtue enterprises, this paper would also analyze how to set an optimized transfer price that achieves both comprehensive cost control and efficient operation. Four steps are taken to optimize the activity cost control system for agricultural virtue enterprises. First, an activity center must be established as the foundation for further data collection and objective settings. Second, a preliminary cost estimate must be formed by activity based costing system to establish to baseline for objective cost. Third, optimal transfer prices must be set between participants in virtue enterprise to maximize the profit for the entire virtue enterprise as well as to protect the benefits for any one of the participants. Last but not least, a range of objective cost for different participants in virtue enterprises can be set based on estimated cost from activity based costing system and optimized transfer price from set by participants. After detailed numerical analysis following four steps illustrated above, this paper witnesses two major findings. First of all, if both virtue enterprise ＂A＂ and supply chain ＂B＂ chooses to disclose information about transfer prices, it can be inferred that the transfer price for virtue enterprise ＂A＂ will not exceed its marginal cost to produce intermediate goods. Second, if neither virtue enterprise ＂A＂ nor supply chain ＂B＂ chooses to disclose information about transfer prices,the transfer price for virtue enterprise ＂A＂ will be exactly the same as its marginal cost to produce intermediate goods. In conclusion a properly set transfer price will assist virtue enterprises with its establishment of a more comprehensive and manageable objective cost control system. To apply the findings into to real world, virtue enterprises should also notice that a complete profit distribution system must be established to motivate participants not pricing their intermediate goods at a higher price than per the profit of virtue enterprise participants. marginal cost. Otherwise, hostile pricing strategy could seriously hamper the profit of virtue enterprise participants.