Corporación Maresa was established in 1997 in Quito - Ecuador, with the goal of forming a conglomerate of manufacturers and dealers of vehicles. The companies comprising the holding company are: Maresa Ensambladora, Mazda, Ford, Avis, Kawasaki and Maresa Colombia. Corporación Maresa oversees the operations of their companies, develops business strategies and provides support to different areas.

The main challenge of Corporación Maresa was to incorporate a strategic cost management culture, from assigning corporate costs of many business units to profitability by product, customer and channel. The organization already had information from the accounting system by cost centers and used standard costing in one of its manufacturing units, however they still could not clearly measure the effort provided by their support areas to the rest of the company. Other missing information was the profitability of Customers and Channels, especially in business units and services.

MyABCM was chosen because of its features, storage capacity, simulation skills, easy handling in the local language (Spanish), reports, graphic analysis and low hardware requirements. The cost models designed at both the corporate level and in each business unit fully met our goals and expectations early in the project. Different levels of cost information and profitability, as well as cost assignment helped to extend the analysis resulting in better decisions related to planning and simulation of scenarios.

All information gathered since the first run of the model is valuable because it allowed us observe the cost behavior, cost sources and impact on business profitability; from now on the company's business goals will be better managed. We should also emphasize the support that the tool provides to manage the corporate budget, the scenario simulation of various units and the capacity analysis.