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Appendix: Glossary
Activity-based costing: Developed in the late 1980s by Robert Kaplan and Robin Cooper of
Harvard Business School. It is primarily concerned with the cost of indirect activities
within a company and their relationships to the manufacturing of specic products. The
basic technique of activity-based costing is to analyze the indirect costs within an organi-
zation and to discover the activities that cause those costs.
Afnity diagram: One of the seven management tools to assist general planning. It organizes dis-
parate language information by placing it on cards and grouping the cards that go together
in some creative way.