Understanding Drivers

A driver is a measure of demand on activities or resources that influence costs or revenue. An activity driver is a measure of the frequency and intensity of the demands that are placed on activities by cost objects. An example of an activity driver is the total number of customer sales orders. A resource driver is a measure of resources that are consumed in an activity. An example of a resource driver is the number of hours directed to activities.

Two kinds of drivers exist in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Advanced Cost Accounting: automatic drivers and manual drivers. Automatic drivers are extracted from data that already exists in the system, such as number of lines on a sales order, purchase order, or work order. Manual drivers are entered manually with the volumes that are associated with them, such as the man-hours required to paint a bicycle or the square footage in a building that is used to paint bicycles.

For example, if a company that manufactures bicycles knows that its two-tone bicycles cost more than its solid color bicycles, it could begin to analyze the real cost that is associated with the bicycles. The company could create a driver that measures man-hours used to paint both types of bicycles, as well as the square footage in the building that is used to paint two-tone versus solid color bicycles. By using these resources as drivers, the company sees the actual cost that is associated with each bicycle.

You set up driver definitions to specify from which tables the system retrieves information to calculate volumes and quantities. Drivers are user defined. They vary based on the types of costs that you want to analyze. Drivers are an integral part of the assignment tool in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Advanced Cost Accounting. Because JD Edwards EnterpriseOne systems are completely integrated, drivers can access information quickly and accurately from other systems, such as the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Sales Order, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Procurement, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Work Order systems.