Abstract

Activity-based costing and management (ABC/M) is an accounting and management approach that enhances the level of understanding about business operation costs, especially the overhead costs. ABC/M generates more reliable and precise cost information compared to those of traditional cost accounting (TCA) systems. The integration of ABC/M in supply chain (SC) mathematical decision support models can elucidate the managerial aspects of ABC/M more as an accounting and management tool.
Most of the supply chain (SC) order management decision support systems (DSSs) developed so far are based mainly on the material flow and capacity constraints without considering the profitability factor. This thesis first presents a profitable-to-promise (PTP) multi-objective mixed-integer programming (MIP) model which considers profitability in order to effectively manage order acceptance decisions in supply chains, subject to capacity constraints by using ABC/M. The proposed model fulfills a desirable amount of orders completely and accepts a selective number of orders partially having the objective of minimizing the amount of residual capacity and increasing the profitability simultaneously.
Because of the common disadvantages that traditional operations research (OR) approaches have such as, complexity in modeling, impossibility of integrating qualitative factors, and inability of on-time model result analysis, the thesis presents a new generic DSS modeling methodology with system dynamics (SD) and based on ABC/M cost structure. The approach presented results a novel real-time cost monitoring and analysis system. SD is a dynamic simulation approach with learning ability to investigate the status changes in the system that correspond to the system variables’ changes as well as their interactions amongst them.
Subsequently, the thesis elaborates on both models by integrating them and introducing them as hybrid (MIP-SD) decision support system. In the hybrid system, MIP model generates the order management policy and SD model monitors the cost behavior of each implemented policy during the implementation process. The main purpose is to show how ABC/M acts as a common cost accounting, information, and managerial approach to synchronize the two mentioned models and to introduce the combination as a hybrid DSS system.
In general, the approach provides the order fulfillment optimal mix aligned with the implementation strategy considering the factors such as, minimizing the residual capacity, considering the customer satisfaction level, selling price, the cost of resources incurred for each order fulfillment policy, and the share of each product and/or order from manufacturing overhead costs. Such an approach can assists management to analyzing and foreseeing the consequences and outcome of each order fulfillment strategy chosen besides finding the optimal order fulfillment combination.