Change Your Business Model --Roger V. Dickeson

"Traditional cost accounting, first developed by General Motors 70 years ago, postulates that total manufacturing cost is the sum of the costs of individual operations. Yet the cost that matters for competitiveness and profitability is the cost of the total process, and that is what the new 'activity-based costing' records and makes manageable. Its basic premise is that business is an integrated process that starts when supplies, materials and parts arrive at the plant's loading dock and continues even after the finished product reaches the end user. Service is still a cost of the product, and so is installation, even if the customer pays."