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Zero-Based Budgeting Is Not a Wonder Diet for Companies

Harvard Business Review

ZBB is a straightforward, intuitively simple way to aggressively strip out costs that cannot be rationally justified. Who would argue that a business should not eliminate unjustifiable costs? Such high-profile exposure has prompted more companies to view ZBB as a fresh “wonder diet” for achieving radical corporate leanness.

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How Hospitals Are Using Patient-Reported Outcomes to Improve Care

Harvard Business Review

Communicating successes like these is a powerful way to bring other physicians on board. Dr. Niazi’s team has used Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing to prove that this program is cost effective, and is currently collecting data to assess its impact on patient outcomes.

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There's a Way to Win the Showdown with Your Customer

Harvard Business Review

Then along came a wave of tools such as activity-based costing for figuring out each product's value to the company, and a lot of those offerings got washed away. And for good reason: Some of them were costing your company a bundle and weren't paying for themselves. Let me explain.

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Measuring and Communicating Health Care Value with Charts

Harvard Business Review

Examples from treating two medical conditions illustrate its power. Total direct costs (personnel, equipment, and supplies) to the provider for a medical treatment are measured using time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC). Brachytherapy for prostate cancer.

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Case Study: When to Drop an Unprofitable Customer

Harvard Business Review

The Power of Customer Costing. The lack of traceability and transparency extended to the costs for specialized equipment that was used only for particular products or customers. Tommy, an avid reader of the business literature, wanted Egan to adopt an activity-based costing , or ABC, approach.