ABSTRACT
Activity based management (ABM) has come of age, and in the hands of able practitioners and enlightened management is an approach that creates essential information that can be acted on: actions that make a real difference to business performance. By extending the use of ABM data to give a process perspective on a business, the outputs from an ABM model provide the basis for initiating process improvements. The difference between revenues and costs, the ABM contribution, either at the product level or the customer level, is the basis for comparing the profitability of products and customers. With the advent of sophisticated software tools and many more ABM experts, models of large size and great complexity can be built that contain fine detail and can calculate outputs in minutes rather than days. ABM is now a flexible friend of many businesses and organizations, fully embedded into 'business as usual', a key support to management decision-making.
