"Radical ideas or just a case of the emperor's new clothes?" By: Mock, Tony, "Management Accounting: Magazine for Chartered Management Accountants", Oct95, Vol. 73, Issue 9

"Throughput accounting (TA)
After a pair of collective nouns, we turn to euphemisms. Throughput accounting, or TA to those who have never thought of serving in a part-time voluntary section of the armed forces, is described in the CIMA Paper 10 syllabus as a modem management practice. It is defined in the CIMA Official Terminology as; 'A method of performance measurement which relates production and other costs to throughput'.
Throughput is, for this purpose, defined as sales revenue less direct material cost. Apparently the idea of a 'constraint' is central to throughput accounting and the recommended measure of efficiency is throughput per unit time in the 'bottleneck' resource.
But wait -- haven't I heard something like this before, in an elementary costing lecture? I'm sure that I remember being told about a useful decision-making technique of contribution per key factor. If an organisation is prepared to believe that, in the short run, all costs other than direct materials are fixed costs, isn't this what throughput accounting is talking about? Why rechristen it?
Just in case I have been missing something, I looked at the only two examples of throughput accounting shown in the texts produced for students by the two professional bodies, CIMA and ACCA. Key factor analysis is all that could be seen."