ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how an Activity Based Management (ABM) approach was applied in a simple catering business. This business has a conventional restaurant to serve customers who eat in, and it has another source of revenue from providing meals to a number of local retirement homes. The restaurant business wanted to know the costs of the two channels of supply to customers: meals eaten in the restaurant, and meals delivered to retirement homes. Once the restaurant business had found the real cost of all of its products and the costs of serving all its different types of customer, it was then able to calculate the ABM Contributions from its products and customers. The main object of the ABM exercise was to cost the products, the channels of supply and the customers. The ABM Customer Contribution has to pay for the infrastructure costs.
