Activity-based Costing and Its Application to Lean Construction

Activity-Based Costing (ABC) has been popular since the 1980s because it prevents cost distortions and provides a process view which traditional cost accounting cannot provide. Activity-Based Costing is based on a “flow view” in production theory in that ABC adopts two-staged costing, i.e., resources are assigned to activities and activities are assigned to cost objects. Lean construction comes from recognizing the limitations of current project management and applying “lean production” to the construction industry. This paper presents an application of ABC and an example of applying ABC to construction, exploring the relationship between activity-based costing and lean construction. It shows that lean project control can encompass cost control by adopting an activity-based costing system.