Introducing Activity-Based Costing in Farm Management: The Design of the FarmBO System

Recent research indicates that farm managers do not rely on adequate informative support in their decision making processes. This paper proposes a model of a Farm Management Information System which integrates the Activity-Based Costing approach. In describing the design and development of the “FarmBO” system, it provides a detailed functional requirement definition and the description of a working system prototype. The solution is designed to show the impact of general costs on the different crops, allocating them on the basis of the production cycle complexity. It includes a report section directly linked to the database which provides crop balance sheets and simulations in terms of what-if analyses. The system allows farm managers to 1) analyze deviations between budgeted and actual costs; 2) compare crop balance sheets across different years; 3) perform sensitivity analyses. This work accounts for prototype validation in two farms and discuss results and possible developments

The benefits of an e-business performance measurement system

This chapter investigates how organizations have been adapting their performance measurement practices in response to their adoption of e-business in their business operations. It aims to identify the features and benefits of an effective e-business performance measurement system. Twelve organizations known to have had some success in developing performance measurement systems suitable for the online environment were studied. The researchers found that these organizations adopted an incremental rather than a radical approach to changing their performance measurement system for e-business, thereby avoiding the costs and disruption associated with the introduction of more complex performance metrics. Secondly, they eschewed the use of best practice recipes (such as the balanced scorecard). The study concludes that although these results may be at odds with the prescriptive generic performance measurement literature, they may be appropriate for the current state of development of e-business