Development of a process based generic product costing system for SME's and an application to a logistic company

The present age of competition leads all the companies to being effective and efficient in their operations. In order to be effective and efficient, they have to know their process information and their product costs. In the recent eras many costing approaches has emerged for the sake of this information. Although there are many studies in the literature which explain modern costing approaches including Activity Based Costing, Target Costing, Kaizen Costing and so on, the number of studies which present real life applications is very few. This is especially true for logistics and transportation applications. One of the main difficulties in land transportation companies is to determine and evaluate true cost of their operations and services, this is because the complexities of the processes and the variations of the transportation services that the company serve. If used and implemented properly ABC can be very helpful for transportation companies to determine cost of their operations with higher correctness. Business process reengineering and process improvements are also important for a competitive market structure of logistics. In this thesis a process based costing system is developed and an application of the model to a land transportation company which is located in Gaziantep is performed. SIMPROCESS process modeling and simulation software is used in order to apply the developed costing model. It is figured out that the proposed costing system can be used in order to achieve process improvements and cost reduction in logistics operations and services. Key Words: Activity based costing, Process based costing, Logistics processes, Logistics costs, Business process modeling, Transportation costs.