Due to the economic globalization, enterprises have started to produce enormous varieties of personalized products. In order to attend to the requirements of their clients, huge changes in the technological process were needed. Consequently, indirect costs became more significant, which led to a new method for distributing the indirect costs, capable of better distributing the indirect costs of products and services.This method was called Activity Based Costing and was investigated by Carlos Yorghi Khoury in 1996 through a research applied in the 500 biggest companies in Brazil. This paper aims to replicate the 1996 research in the biggest companies from Santa Catarina, Brazil, in order to observe if the results obtained from these companies are similar to those from the 1996 research. For the empirical research, 81 out of 200 questionnaires sent to the biggest companies from Santa Catarina were duly returned. The research led to the conclusion that, although the companies from Santa Catarina have a large knowledge of the ABC system, some of the companies that introduced this system are already giving it up in function of the complexity in appropriating the cost and the indirect expense from the activities to the products.
activity based costing; resources; activities; products
