Activity-based costs
Activity-based costing
After you have declared your driver-dependent cost centers, you have to assign them to activities in your collaboration diagrams, which means that every time the activity is executed, costs are generated. Select an activity within your diagram, be sure to use the simulation property set, and click on 'Activity based costing' (Figure 1) for opening an extra window, which will allow you to configure the individual costing.
First, you have to choose the corresponding cost center from the drop-down box to the left (see Figure 2). If the drop-down box is empty, be sure that you have declared your cost centers within the same BPI project.
Next, you have to choose between three types of costing indicators:
-
Flow-dependent means that the value in the column 'costs' will be booked one time per execution of one activity.
-
Time-dependent means that the amount to be booked depends on the duration of the activity. The value in the column 'cost' will be multiplicated with the individual activity duration.
-
Property-dependent means that the value in column 'costs' is multiplicated with the value of the given process variable, which may be individually modified in python scripts.
You only can set a value in the 'Costs'-Column if the selected cost center is declared as driver-dependent. If you select a driver-neutral cost-center here, just the proportional assignment to different processes is influenced here, note the amount of costs itself.
Python Scripts
You can access the current cost center of a process instance within Python scripts, e.g. the following expression can be used to get the cost amount of the cost center "FEK" at the time of the call and assign it to the variable "amount":
amount = SimulationContext.Costing.Amount("FEK")The following expression shows how to assign cost centers to activities in your collaboration diagrams with help of python scripts instead of with the three types of costing indicators:
SimulationContext.Costing.Increment("FEK", 1)