South America vs. North America

Audrey Hepburn March 4, 2013 Mr. Miller AP U. S. History South vs. North 1800-1850 FRQ: In spite of sharing a country, the Northern and Southern areas of America had many differences and distinctions, which ended up dividing the nation. During the first part of the 1800's the North and the South grew in different ways. In the North, cities were centers of wealth and manufacturing. There were many skilled workers. In the South there was not much manufacturing. There were not many skilled workers. Most of the people were farmers. Money came from plantation crops, like cotton, and slavery was a major piece of their economy.Their respective societies were also diverse. The period between 1800 and 1850 brought rapid population growth throughout the United States. In the North the overall population rose from about 5 million to 31 million during this time. Part of this increase was due to massive immigration. Between 1830 and 1850 over 2 million Irish, German, and other northern Europeans arrived in the United States. Most of them settled in the North. The population of the South was made up of white Americans and enslaved Africans. By 1800 there were about 4 million slaves in America and the United States was the largest slaveholding republic.The total population of the South reached 12 million. The South was an overwhelmingly agricultural region of mostly farmers. Most farmers lived in the backcountry on medium sized farms, while a small number of planters ran large farms, or plantations. The South was ideal for agriculture and had the ability to grow crops in large amounts. However, only one-fourth of the Southern population owned slaves, and most of these were the planters. The rest of the population was made up of white independent farmers, tenant farmers (who rented land and paid the landowners in crops or money), laborers, or frontier families.Most Southerners lived on farms, scattered along the coastal plains and the small farmers in the backcountry. Since th e economy was based on agriculture, industries and towns developed at a slower pace than in the North. There were many small towns along the banks of rivers and the coasts. Only a few large cities developed as trading centers in the South. Plantations were so large and so distant from each other that they became almost self-sufficient, like small towns. Cities in the North thrived as centers of commerce. They were set up along the Atlantic coast and served as centers of trade between the North and Europe.They were hubs of manufacturing of textiles (cloth goods) and other products. Many people from rural New England moved to the cities looking for employment opportunities. In 1800 about 5 percent of the population lived in cities, but by 1850 nearly 15 percent did. Increased trade and manufacturing drew many laborers to town to work. Cities were often crowded and dirty. Not until after 1830’s were harbors and streets improved, sanitation systems were started, and police forces were created. Public services such as education began to take root. The Southern economy was based on agriculture.Crops such as cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar cane and indigo were grown in great quantities. They were raised on large farms, known as plantations, which were supported by slave labor. After Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, cotton took over as â€Å"king† of the southern economy. Whitney invented the cotton gin, a machine that separated the seed from the cotton fiber much faster than could be done by hand. This caused a rapid growth and expansion of cotton production. In 1793 Southern farmers produced about 10,000 bales of cotton. By 1835, they were growing over 1 million bales a year.Cotton exports made up two-thirds of the total value of American exports. To clear land and grow cotton, Southerners used slave labor. Slavery was essential for the South’s prosperity. The South had little manufacturing, and Southerners wanted cheap imports. Since t hey exported most of their cotton and tobacco, they believed that high tariffs-–taxes on imported goods—would scare away the foreign markets that bought their goods. For these reasons the South was against tariffs. The North, however, favored high tariffs to protect its industries from foreign competition.The Northern economy was based on many different industries. These included shipping, textiles, lumber, furs, and mining. The majority of people lived on small farms and found that much of the land was suited for subsistence farming—raising food crops and livestock for family use—rather than producing goods to export, or send to other countries. Northerners stated to use their â€Å"ingenuity† to manufacture all kinds of goods. With the use of waterpower and coal for steam plants, manufacturing developed quickly. People realized that the many surrounding waterfalls were cheap source of energy, and the waterpower began to be used to run the factori es. Items such as textiles, iron, and ships were manufactured in great quantities. These goods were traded for foreign products, as well as transported to and from all continents by trading ships. The growth of trade, manufacturing and transportation brought many changes to cities in the North. Cities took on an increasingly important role in determining the culture of the North. Merchants, manufacturers, wage earners, and new business owners brought new ideas to the North. The majority of Northerners were Protestant believers.Villages became strong centers of community activities. Cities were important centers of art, culture, and education. Most cities printed newspapers and books and provided many forms of recreation, such as dancing, card playing, and theatre. Both religion and education were organized institutes. Most towns had both schools and churches. Public education grew in the north after the 1830s, but few boys went to secondary school, and college was reserved mostly fo r the wealthy. There were few schools or churches in the South, since neither education nor religion were very organized.The best educated were the sons of planters. On plantations there were sometimes small schools, and often planters hired private tutors to teach their children until they could be sent off to private schools. Small farmers had little or no education. Life in the South revolved around the small, wealthy class of planters and the agricultural system they controlled. Planters were the aristocracy—the upper class—of the South. They lived like country gentleman of England and ran the political and economic life. Plantations were far apart and developed their own communities.Recreational activities included such things as fox hunting, dancing, horseracing, and watching cockfights. During the first half of the 1800s transportation vastly improved, and the size of the United States more than doubled. Methods of long-distance transports, such as steamships an d railroads, affected the South because products could more easily be sold to more distant markets. By 1850 about 9,000 miles of railroad spread across the Southern states. Meanwhile, hundreds of steamboats moved Southern crops to the North and to European markets.Still, this was not nearly as vast a railroad system as the North. Most of the new rail lines were in the North, spanning out to the west. By 1850, 30,000 miles of railroad tracks connected distant parts of the United States. . Canals, mostly built in the North, were also a cheap source of transportation. The Erie Canal was clearly a success for New York commercial activities. Many other cities began to follow suit and within a decade a system of over 3,000 canals provided water transportation between the Eastern seaboard and rivers in the West. By 1850 there were over 88,000 miles of surfaced roads.Although the Northern and Southern states shared many things, in the period of 1800-1850, their disparities began to outshine what they had in common, which helped to lead into the Civil War. Their economies were polar opposites, with the Northern industrializing and the South farming and exporting; their societies were based on two diverse things, the South being an almost aristocratic system and the North focusing on factory work and industrializing. Their governmental ideals differed, especially and so blatantly emphasized in their opinions on tariffs.

My Masters Are You Mad? Essay

Interestingly, the concept of ‘madness’ can be interpreted and explored in many ways. The foolishness of one’s actions; the mayhem or pandemonium of a situation; or the mental instability of an individual. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night mentions ‘madness’ more often than any of his other plays, suggestion that madness plays a central role in the development of both the plot and the characters. The intention of Malvolio’s question, although potentially ambiguous, is to suggest to his ‘masters’, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, that they are crazy to be up in the early hours of the morning making such a noise in Olivia’s house. Through his question Twelfth Night, indirectly, presents many answers that lead us, the reader, to our own conclusion about the degree of madness within each of the characters and the situations they create or find themselves in. The theme of love as a cause of madness is one that presents itself regularly in Twelfth Night. As the play opens, Orsino talks of how too much love can make one’s appetite for it ‘sicken and so die’. He says how love can make you want things one minute, and then, in another, make you sick of them, ‘But falls into abatement and low price Even in a minute.’ Love should be, in theory, a powerful, all consuming feeling of euphoria and fulfillment. However, when Orsino describes this violent mix of desires accompanying love, he seems to be referring to everybody’s experience of love. He is generalising and assuming, however disruptive and chaotic love is, everybody experiences it in the same way he describes. As the play progresses, we are shown that his love for Olivia is unrequited, ‘How will she love, when the rich golden shaft hath killed the flock of all affections [†¦] !’ Unrequited love is impure love, as the path of the one who love is almost certainly headed for despair. The suggestion that such a beautiful emotion could result in turbulence and such pain & upset is the suggestion that love, and the journey it takes Orsino on, is mad. The readers are left contemplating that if Orsino knows the path he it taking is unstable, why does he bother continuing when he knows his fate? Love has left him mad & unhinged and, possibly, incapable of making rational and thoughtful decisions. Instead he leaves to ‘sweet beds of flowers’ to further ponder his emotions. The loss of Olivia’s both brother and father within a short space of time has left her grieving excessively and unnecessarily. Sir Toby opens a scene by questioning Olivia’s behavior, ‘What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus?’ intimating his disapproval. He is the first to be bold enough to point out the ridiculousness of her overly-melodramatic grieving, having vowed to hide away for seven years. It is considered appropriate to mourn for the loss of a loved one for a period of time, but, in Olivia’s case, seven years would usually be considered inordinate. Before Olivia even makes her debut appearance in Twelfth Night, precast as a self-indulgent and overemotional character. The theme of madness again presents itself in her self-important view of the world. The fact that Olivia is giving up seven years of her own life to grieve, shows her desire to play the victim, hiding away from the world outside her house and the affections of others. When Viola, in disguise, comes to Olivia on Orsino’s behalf, Olivia plays upon his affections for her, teasing his messenger with her disguise, ‘Give me my veil; come throw it o’er my face.’ If she truly was wretched from the loss of her brother and father she would not indulge in such frivolous devices to keep others interested. The prolonged grieving she had opened herself up to has been at the expense of her better-judgment and maturity. She, a ‘master’ of Malvolio, as his question includes, has slipped into instability and silliness, and, if she keeps it up, is not far from the madness that seems to engulf the characters of Twelfth Night. The role of the ‘fool’ in Olivia’s household is to speak their mind, having no fear of the possible repercussions they may face from their masters for their honesty. Ironically, but perhaps unsurprisingly as this is a work of confusion in Shakespearean proportions, Feste, the clown is perhaps the most sane and wise of all the characters. Feste makes a comment to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, asking them if they have ever seen ‘the picture of ‘We Three’?’ The picture he is referring to is that of two fools, with the idea that the viewed is the third fool. He is suggesting that they either are the fools in the picture, or have both seen it and, therefore, make up the third fool. He is the only character inferior to both Sir Toby and Sir Andrew to refer to their drunken and feasting lifestyle as foolish, showing not only his boldness, but also his astute observations and wit. Later on, when speaking to Viola disguised as Cesario, he comments on her lack of facial hair, ‘Now Jove, in his next commodity of hair, send thee a beard!’. Although he may only be commenting on the fact a post-pubescent boy is without a beard, it is also suggested that he is wise to the fact ‘Cesario’ is not the eunuch he appears to be but is, in fact, a girl, Viola. Shakespeare’s introduction of such a minor, and seemingly insignificant, line that holds incredible subtext is enough to suggest that Feste, the fool, is not as foolish or as mad as the other characters perceive him. The many ways in which madness can be interpreted in both the characters perceptions of each other and the reader’s, or audience’s, perception opens Twelfth Night up to the questioning of the sanity and the rationale behind the motives of the characters. It has never been more true to say of something than it is of this play that madness is in the eye of the beholder.

Activity Based Management Essay

Activity based management (ABM) is an approach to management that aims to maximize the value adding activities to the customers while minimizing or eliminating non-value adding activities. The objective of ABM is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization in securing its markets. It draws on activity based-costing (ABC) as its major source of information and focuses on managing activities to (1) reduce costs, (2) create performance measures, (3) improve cash flow and quality and, (4) produce enhanced value products in order to improve customer value (Business Dictionary.com). This ABM system’s top priority is in eliminating or improving those activities to increase profitability by seeking out areas where a business is losing money such as the factors which cause activities to be performed or activity cost to change. Undeniably, in order to improve an organization’s work processes and activities to effectively and efficiently meet the rapidly changing environment in this globalisation world, management practices and methods have changed over the last decade and will continue to change in future. THE TRADITIONAL ABSORPTION COSTING is the first system implemented to keep track of the true cost of a product or service. It assigns indirect cost to cost object and uses unsophisticated methods to assign indirect costs. It allocates overheads to production and service departments and uses small number of 2nd stage cost drivers to allocate costs from cost centres or pools to productions or cost objects. This system will only be appropriate when the (i)direct costs were the dominant costs, (ii)indirect costs were relatively small, (iii)information costs are high, (iv)there is a lack of intense global competition and (v)a limited range of products is produced, it might be difficult for every organization to use it. For instance, this system might not be appropriate for companies with complex processes and manufacturing practices. The large increase of indirect and overhead expenses will make the traditional costing method less efficient. Therefore, in 1980s, ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING (ABC) was introduced to overcome these  problems. ABC is a system for managing the organization better. It is a one-off exercise that measures the activities’ cost and performance, resources and the objects which consume them so as to generate more accurate and meaningful information for decision-making. It uses sophisticated or modern methods to assign the indirect costs. This ABC system allocates overheads to each major activity but not to departments and allocates costs to products or cost objects. However, it limits the company to have advantage of the ABC technique. It cannot be used for official record keeping as the IRS and stockholders require the use of traditional methods to create necessary reports for taxes. In another words, companies need to use two different costing methods in order to get the benefit. The system is costly to build, complex to sustain and to modify. Therefore, the emphasis has shifted from ABC to ACTIVITY-BASED MANAGEMENT (ABM) which is also known as ACTIVITY-BASED COST MANAGEMENT (ABCM) later on. ABC is a subset of ABM as the application of ABC evolved from a manufacturing product costing orientation to a management philosophy of activity management applied in industries and organizations (Business Dictionary.com). ABM has grown largely out of the work of the Texas-based Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing-International (CAM-I) (Investopedia). The CAM-I has initiated the development of a comprehensive glossary on ABCM terms by clarifying the significant confusion regarding the semantic and acronym associated with the activity based information (Investopedia). This ABM system makes the cost and operating information useful to improve decision making. Through the ABM analysis process, the management will gain a thorough understanding of its business processes and cost behaviour and management team in the company. In addition, the results of an ABM analysis can help a company generate more accurate budgets and financial forecasts (Investopedia). It gives management insight into the cost structures for making and selling diverse products. In a simplified term, ABC is used to answer the question, â€Å"what do things cost?† and for ABM, a process view is taken to understand factors which cause the costs to occur. This system focuses on the ways to redirect and improve the use of resources, by using  ABC data, to enhance the value created for customers and other stakeholders (Investopedia). These two systems (ABC and ABM) have attracted high levels of interest from both academics and practitioners since its emergence in the late 1980’s. It is mainly due to the significant change in cost management systems they have brought. Due to the lack of pertinence and relevancy of traditional costing that leads to mutual subsidy between products and cost, ABC and ABM are used to enhance or replace the traditional cost calculation methods. For example, ABM approach reports by activities while traditional analysis is by departments; ABM reporting is by sub-activities but traditional is by expense categories and ABM reporting can reports information on activities that are cross departmental boundaries whereas traditional is not allowed(Drury C, 2008). Thus, ABM is concluded to have more meaningful information as it gives more visibility to the cost of undertaking the activities that make up the organization and may raise the issues that are not highlighted in traditional analysis. Most forward-thinking companies have implemented them, or are in the process of doing so as it can be applied to different types of companies, including manufacturers, service providers, non-profits, schools and government agencies (Business Dictionary.com). CONTENTS 1. Features of ABM system _A. STAGES OF IMPLEMENTATION_ In order to implement ABM system, the companies are required to carry out the three out of the four stages in ABC (Drury C, 2008). The steps are listed as below: (i) Identify major activities that result in costs being incurred, The activities are the aggregation of units of work or tasks such as machine  set-up cost, purchasing cost and warehousing cost that use up resources. In order to identify all the activities within the company, activity analysis has to be carried out. The activities chosen must be at a reasonable level of aggregation based on the cost verses benefit criteria. In addition, the activities have to be either influenced by the total cost of activity centre or the ability of a single cost driver to provide a satisfactory determinant of the cost of the activity. (ii) Assign cost centers to each activity, and The companies should not use the arbitrary allocations in assigning the significant proportion of costs to activities as it will reduce the reliability of cost. They have to identify and assign the direct costs to specific activity and assign the indirect costs on cause-and-effect cost drivers. By doing so, the cost incurred on each activity can be determined. (iii) Determine the cost driver for each major activity In this stage, the drivers are called as activity cost drivers. In selecting the cost driver, there are two factors which the companies need to consider. Firstly, the cost driver should provide a good explanation of costs of each activity cost pool. Additionally, the cost driver should be measurable easily, and the data should be easily obtained and be identifiable with products. (The cost driver can be production or service oriented). _B. TWO CATEGORIES OF ABM APPLICATION_ Based on the source adapted by Kaplan & Cooper (1998), this system accomplishes its objectives through two complemetary applications which are the operational ABM (â€Å"Doing things right†) and strategic ABM (â€Å"Doing the right things†). Operational ABM enhances efficiency of operation and asset utilization and lowers costs. Its focus are mainly on doing things right and performing activities more efficiently. Management techniques such as activity  management, business process reengineering, total quality management, and performance measurement are used in the ABM application. As for strategic ABM, it attempts to change the activities demands and boost proï ¬ tability by improving activity efficiency. It focuses on choosing proper activities for the operation, eliminating non-essential activities and selecting the most proï ¬ table customers. Strategic ABM applications use management techniques such as process design, customer proï ¬ tability analysis, and value chain analysis. 2. Comparison between Activity-based management system (ABM) and traditional system ABM focuses on activity performed by business and hence, it views business as a set of linked activity that ultimately adding value to customers. Its goal is to satisfy customer needs while making fewer demands on organizational resources. Hence, ABM could have information of activities such as why activities to be performed, how to perform the activities and how well they are performed. In contrast, traditional system focuses on types of cost from departments. It gives less information to manager for the needs in decision making. ABM is better than traditional system as ABM could provide wider information and information could go deeply and more detailed as needed by the management in decision making. Besides, the ABM system only seeks to use cause-and-effect cost driver which is different than the traditional system. It does not rely on arbitrary allocation bases. As we can see from table 1, the information provided by both systems is about customer order processing. However, these two systems take into account different information while preparing the customer order processing. ABM focuses on information that is relevant in the process of customer ordering while traditional analysis focuses on the types of cost incurred in the customer order processing. ABM ANALYSIS RM Preparing Quotations 100 Receiving Customer Order 280 Expediting 120 Total 500 TRADITIONAL ANALYSIS RM Salaries 110 Telephone bill 170 Depreciation of Asset 120 Total 500 Table 1 In addition, ABM is different from traditional system in terms of the report approach. ABM report is determined by activities while traditional system is determined by departments. It can include crossing departmental boundaries. For instance, material purchasing process might involve not only one department but it includes inventory control department, purchasing department and account payable department. The manager will be able to know how the amount spent (e.g: RM 2000) to be used in purchasing material under ABM system. It may show the relevant information such as inventory reviewing, sending purchase requisition and sending purchase order. The manager will be able to know how purchasing of material works on and what are the reasons of purchase delay as well as how to minimize the cost of purchase. It focuses on information based on activity. As for traditional system, manager can get the information on material purchase which costs for RM2000 only. However, this RM2000 does not comply with the amount of goods order. By looking at one information itself, the reasons of non-compliance cannot be tracked as there is lack of information. Therefore, ABM system is better since it did not focus on information based on cost but it assigns  cost of activities to products according to product’s demand for activities and relies on cost centres and cost drivers that cause activity resource consumption. Other than that, it assigns activity costs to cost objects on basis of cost driver usage and measures resources consumed by cost objects more accurately. In addition, ABM system provides both information from value and non value added activities. As for traditional system, it provides information on value added activity only. Value added activity is an activity that supports primary objective of producing outputs. For instance, activity like colouring adds value to a book. Under value added activity, traditional report will show the amount spent in colouring since it adds usefulness to customers. Customers would likely to buy books with some colouring or some pictures rather than books with only words as it might help them in memorizing and understanding the information stated in the book better. However, if the profit does not increase like what the company expected, manager will be able to trace back the cost incurred by looking at amount spent in colouring – non-value added activity. Hence, non value added activity is important as it may affect the company’s profit. Non value added activity is an activity where an opportunity is available for cost reduction without decreasing product’s service potential to customer such as storing and moving raw materials. Under ABM system, manager will be able to draw attention on this issue and trace back the reasons such as waste in the production. Manager will be able to track the cost which has been wasted in the production by reducing material movement and improving production flow without reducing the value added to customer. In other words, customer can have same quality of products-same kind of books while management could reduce the cost of production. 3. Benefits and Limitations of ABM system One of the benefits of the system is to help the management in decision making. It provides better decision making as the information provided by the ABM system is more useful and reliable. The management can make informed decision about product mix, lines of business, process, product design,  services, capital investment and pricing. For instance, manager will able to make decision on how much capital to invest in new product and what kind of new product to be launched based on information that manager obtains in ABM system. Furthermore, ABM is a system for continuous improvements. The system is not just an accounting tool but it also provides many tools that can enhance organizational performance management. In other words, ABM system provides other information as well (the product mix, customer services, line of business and capital investment) that would be able to help an organization in its future development and improvement. For instance, an organization knows how to serve customer better by looking into information provided in customer services activity. ABM also provides a better understanding of cost driver. It is a factor that affects the costs associated with an activity. Managers apply activity- based management system to the operational activity in order to determine the cost to perform an activity and the cost associated with not performing the activity. Through this activity cost drivers, it seeks to provide an extensive view on the actual costs of an activity. For instances, we can see in the Mason & Cox. In Mason & Cox, they feel that it is expensive to implement the activity-based costing system because it is more complex and expensive to maintain. Nevertheless, ABM seems to be more helpful to them in term of improving the company profitability. For example, saving had been achieved by targeting non-value-added activities. Their real cost driver had been identified so that manager may know what to eliminate. The drop in the price of the high-volume lines had met with customer approval. Furthermore, ABM enables company to monitor and improve quality and delivery customer value by tracking cost driver. The new approach provided timely information about factors that were important to customers and factors that employees could control. There was no doubt that ABM had helped Mason & Cox to improve both profitability and customer value. Besides that, in Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida (BCBSF) needs more sophisticated cost information to make better decision in order to compete in the nature of the health care insurance industry and the need to manage the cost of operation like ways to  allocate administrative cost to the products and services. Hence, BCBSF decided to implement ABM system. ABM helps manager to examine the analysis of value added cost and non-value added costs. A value added cost is the cost of an activity that cannot be eliminated without affecting a product’s value to the customer. Some value added costs are always necessary, as long as the activities that drive such cost are performed efficiently and effectively. For instances, we can truly understand this concept in the Carpenter Company. The senior vice president of sales and marketing said that pillow fall into two distinct segments, the â€Å"commodity† part of the business and value-added line. For the â€Å"commodity† part of the business- consists of polyester-filled pillows which are a normal pillow. Besides that, the â€Å"value-added line†, which features technology-driven fibers and fabrics designed to enhance sleep. As we can see, Carpenter Company had produced variety function of pillow like muscle stress and pain relieve pillow as well as pillow which reduce unnatural awakenings. Today, consumers are better educated about the benefits of various sleep surfaces and they recognize that the role of pillow can play in quality sleep. Although the price for a pillow which features technology-driven fibers and fabrics designed will be expensive but it can help consumer to have a quality sleep. Thus, consumers will not mind to pay more to improve a quality sleep. As a result, we can see that the â€Å"value-added line† may help company to gain profit. In contrast, a non-value added cost is the cost of an activity that cannot be eliminated without diminishing the value. Non-value added cost activities are assumed to be unnecessary as a result it always be minimized like storing and handling inventories; transportation of raw material or partly finished products. If this non-value added costs happened, company may reduce or eliminate it by careful redesign of the operational process. As we can see how Taipei Fubon Bank deals with those non-value added costs in this mature and complex market. Taipei Fubon Bank needs to accurately determine profit and loss data by customer and customer group so that it could help bank to reduce operating costs and increase profit while maintaining it quality of service. Hence, the bank had developed a customer profitability  management (CPM) system that provide thorough information regarding cardholder spending pattern and profitability to build highly targeted marketing and retention program. This system did helped bank to reduce cost by updating timely management report, thus speeding marketing strategy adjustment decision. However, they wanted more information regarding a detailed analysis such as the profitability by card type at the individual customer level. As a result, they entered into the new CPM system by performing an in-depth analysis at the transaction level. The new CPM system contributes to division-wide productivity through the delivery of as-needed reporting to the user custom portal. The reporting may include customer spending habits, customer ranking by demographic criteria or the profitability of co-branded card by service channel. After using this system, Taipei Fubon Bank has significantly improving division profitability and now they can make more faster and accurate decision. In Dow Chemical Company (DCC) which produces chemicals and plastics implement ABM to identify the activities they perform, eliminate non-value-added activities, determine cost drivers, set activity price to charge users and benchmark these price to ensure that they are competitive. While ABM has brought benefits to DCC but also brought many challenges to them. For instances, DCC feels that it is difficult to capture cost driver information without creating additional work. As the activity analysis became more and more detailed, DCC had to justify the complexities in obtaining and processing activity information. Ultimately the company decided that should not break activities down to task level, otherwise the resultant activities were too small and numerous. By comparing with the traditional system, ABM system is more costly. Implementation of ABM system requires many resources such as human resources and time consuming. Different activities require different resources. Data that concerns on major activities must be measured, collected and entered into system. As we can see that Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS) feels that ABM system is a timely and costly system. By using ABM system, they need to implement a thorough mapping of all processes, drill down and filtering of all â€Å"relevant† activities, the identification of cost  driver and others are enormous challenges. Thus, this may cause the company to take up much time and resources because this company consists of over 1100 staffs. Furthermore, everyone may have different point of view and searching for different data therefore they need times to eliminate and collect the right data into the right activities. Incorrect data collection and allocation may result to setbacks during the implementation stages and may jeopardize the whole project. Misinterpretation might also happen in ABM system. This is because most of the information is interrelated and ambiguous. For instance, cost assigned to material, products and customer may be relevant and cause the manager to overlook some information. This causes misinterpretation happen and link to the wrong decision making. Wrong decision making may cause some issues happen in the operation such as production delay, over-production and wrong shipping. Reports by using ABM system are suitable for internal users only and cannot report to external users. This is because ABM system has limitations since it does not conform to generally accepted accounting principles (G.A.A.P). Stakeholder might not be able to understand the reports on ABM system and therefore, ABM system is only restricted for internal use. CONCLUSION Previously, company usually apply traditional accounting system to manage the company’s operational activity but this system does not provide more detailed information that needed in this competitive environment. Therefore, managers require better information by developing activity-based management. This approach allow everyone in the organization understand where costs are being incurred, why are they being incurred and how these activities contribute to a higher value added to customers. Moreover, ABC explores to identify activities that can be eliminated or improved. In additional to that, communications will improve and changes are easier to make if company conducts the activity-based approach. In addition to the above purpose, we feel that ABM system may be useful for a company. This is because it not only focuses on the product of a company but also the services and customers of a company. Besides that, it also help company to find out the cause of a problem, action plan for future development as well as evaluation of managers’ or departments’ present performance. In addition to that, it also helps company utilize true cost data which generated through ABC for further improvement in business profitability in the long run. ABM in best practice firm lies at the heart of the decision-support process. Integrating ABM within the total information and management control system of the organization can lead to quantum improvements. Therefore, an organization needs to understand and address the common pitfalls and barriers to success at every stage of implementation. Besides, the ABM system should include and draw on the insights of the people who use it no matter during planning, activity analysis or other so that the implementation will success when the people use the system. Organization should tailor to the unique strategy, structure, capabilities, and needs of the firm so that the implementation will be succeeded. This is because ABM will not look the same in every organization although it is a universally useful concept. Finally, we have an in-depth understanding of ABM during the process of working out this assignment and we found out that activity-based approach has more advantages than disadvantages. We have learned many things like time management and how to get along with our group members. Although we spent much time for discussing the lessons and recommendations, we didn’t have any argument during our discussion and everything went on smoothly. BIBLIOGRAPHY _Advantages, Disadvantages and Limitations of Accounting Based Costing (ABC) System_. (n.d.). Accounting For Management. Retrieved March 9, 2013, from http://accounting4management.com/limitations_of_activity_based_costing.htm Business Dictionary.com. (n.d.). Retrieved February 1, 2013, from http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/activity-based-management- ABM.html Cardos,I.R., & Pete,S. 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Retrieved February 23, 2013, from http://bedtimesmagazine.com/2013/01/power-of-pillows/ Implementing Activity-BasedManagement: Avoiding the Pitfalls. (1998) Instituite of Management Accounts. Retrieved March 9, 2013, from http://www.imanet.org/PDFs/Public/Research/SMA/Implementing %20Activity%20Based%20mngt_Avoiding.pdf Investopedia. (n.d.). Retrieved February 1, 2013, from http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/abm.asp#axzz2Jng4KVP6 Leo, S. (2010). Taipei Fubon Bank Uses Activity-Based Management to Build Customer Profitability. Retrieved from http://www.b-eye- network.com/view/12857 Managing costs and time for customer value. (n.d). Retrieved from http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/dl/free/0074711903/ 50509/sample_ch15.pdf May & Margaret. ( Jan 1995). Activity-based management accounting. Management Accounting, 73(1),40. Retrieved from Business Source Complete, Pro Quest. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com. Sarkis, Joseph, Meade, Laura, Presley & Adrien. (2006). 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