A proposal for the implementation of time-driven activity based costing system in port operations management

As a result of the phenomenon of globalization that exerts an influence over today's world, the importance of physical and economic borders between countries has been diminished. In this context, the interdependency between the countries increases day by day. The impact of globalization shows itself mainly at commercial life, so the delivery of goods and services to the target market in a more rapid and economic way than the rivals constitutes a significant competitive advantage. As a result of this, the transportation systems that connect global supply chains, work efficiently, and are cost-efficient come to the fore as elements that foster the economic developments of the countries. The fact that over 80 percent of the global trade by volume is carried by sea and handled at port facilities shows that the commercial competitive power of countries depends on their effective access to the international maritime transportation services and port networks. Container transportation, which can also be called as "industrialization of maritime transportation", gained significant ground in the world trade by offering numerous technical and economic advantages, and accordingly the container terminals have grown up in importance. Increased competition between container terminals puts pressure on the ports to reduce costs and increase operational productivity. To have the right cost information constitutes a prerequisite for cost reduction. In addition, cost information is of vital importance for planning, execution and control of business operations. In the light of these facts, to determine the cost of production process at the container terminals by different costing methods and to compare their outcomes according to accuracy and applicability constitutes the aim of this research. For this purpose, an empirical study at TCDD İzmir Alsancak Port has been conducted based upon the amount of service production and actual costs realized in the year 2013, and various container movements' costs have been estimated according to traditional costing, activity based costing, and time-driven activity based costing methods. The above mentioned methods have been compared with each other in order to identify their capability to reflect the production process, and to estimate costs accurately. Keywords: Costing Systems, Time-Driven Activity Based Costing, Activity Based Costing, Port Operating Costs, Container Terminal Costs.