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Activity Based Costing

"The Cost of Doing the Business" The business of a bulk handling facility is to move commodities from a source to a destination. This process will move a quantity of product and consume resources in the form of energy, personnel and materials. Value added processes like sampling and treatment are also carried out as part of the storage and supply business within the handling facility.

The objective of the Activity based Costing module is to combine the performance outputs with resource inputs and create empirical units that allow the business to be measured. These Costing Units or Unit based production responses are exported to the corporate system in ANSI/SA-95 format where appropriate cost drivers for resources and fixed assets are applied to derive the actual operational costs of the facility.

The Costing Units will allow the facility to compare the costs of:

• Effective and total cost of producing
• Cost of non producing, with and without activities running
• Cost of lost production during a maintenance downtime
• Cost of lost production during an operational downtime
• Cost of producing on different shift rosters
• Cost of producing at different times of the day

The corporate layer can then further differentiate between terminal facilities.

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Activity Analysis

"How well are we utilising our assets, services and resources?" The objective of activity analysis is to accurately measure the performance of assets, services and resources on the basis of productive time, throughput and quality. The resulting information allows immediate identification of inefficiencies and where processes can be optimised to improve profitability.

The BULKmetrix task manager monitors all activities, events and work periods. It is responsible for the collection of real time data from operational plant, instrumentation and data input stations as well as periodical data relating to plant operations. This data is filtered within a rigid set of interruption and priority rules to ensure only the relevant data is processed.