2.1 Economic Efficiency as a Process Property

Today the economic efficiency of the company is scarcely a property of the products any more but rather of the processes. Companies today are thus faced with the task of optimizing their process chains, something which in practice leads to a reorientation in resource steering which is decisively important in competition: while in the past attempts were made to exert control over the economic efficiency of production on the basis of figures from the company's accounting department, the approach today is to try to identify the processes lying behind these figures. That, in brief, is how Norton and Kaplan tackle the problem with their "balanced scorecard" (Kaplan and Norton 1997). The method which has been widespread to date is to organize resources by the result via costs. This approach is foundering on account of the increasing proportion of overhead costs since it forces the cost accountant to take a considerable cost block which for logical reasons cannot be allocated to the cost unit (products) in a manner corresponding to the cause of the costs and notwithstanding this to still allocate it to artificially created codes (cost center account) in a way unconnected with the cause of the costs.

The main points of criticism may be summarized as follows:

• Overheads are proportional to time time consumption figures (lead times) thus become an extremely important cause of costs. They are not however picked up by traditional cost accounting there is no time dimension...