He began his career as a strategic planner with FMC Corporation. With FMC’s Link-Belt Division Cokins served as Financial Controller and then Production Manager, which exposed him to the linkages between cost information, strategy, operations, performance measurements, and results. In 1981 Cokins began his management consulting career with Deloitte. There he was trained by Eli Goldratt and Robert Fox and implemented Theory of Constraints (TOC) OPT software. Cokins then joined KPMG Peat Marwick, where he implemented integrated business systems and ultimately focused on cost management systems, including activity-based costing (ABC). At KPMG Peat Marwick, Cokins was trained in ABC by Professors Robert S. Kaplan of the Harvard Business School and Robin Cooper. Next, Cokins headed the National Cost Management Consulting Services for Electronic Data Systems. In 1996 he joined ABC Technologies, a leading ABC software vendor that was acquired in 2002 by SAS, a global leader in business intelligence, analytics, and performance management software.

Cokins was the lead author of the acclaimed An ABC Manager’s Primer (1992), sponsored by the Institute of Management Accountants and the Consortium for Advanced Management International (CAM-I). In 1993 Gary received CAM-I’s Robert A. Bonsack Award for Distinguished Contributions in Advanced Cost Management. His second book was Activity-Based Cost Management: Making It Work (McGraw-Hill, 1996), was judged by the Harvard Business School Press as “read this book first.” His 2001 book, Activity-Based Cost Management: An Executive’s Guide (John Wiley & Sons, 2001) regularly ranked as the #1 best-seller by book distributors of over 150 books on the topic. In 2004 he authored Performance Management: Finding the Missing Pieces to Close the Intelligence Gap (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). Gary is a coauthor of the textbook, Cost Management: A Strategic Emphasis (McGraw-Hill, 2008).

Cokins is certified in Production and Inventory Management by the Association for Operations Management. He serves on several committees of professional societies, including CAM-I, the Supply Chain Council, and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). He was the coeditor of CAM-I’s 2001 Glossary of ABC/M Terms and is a member of the Journal of Cost Management Editorial Advisory Board.

Cokins resides in Cary, North Carolina, with his wife, Pam Tower. He has two stepdaughters, Jennifer and Kristin, and two grandsons, Conor and Brodie. He can be contacted at garyfarms@aol.com or gary.cokins@sas.com.

Since 2001, I have expanded my understanding of how management works. I learned that cost management must be done in a much broader context—enterprise risk-based performance management. This is because one must consider time, quality, cost, risk, service level, resource capacity planning, innovation, customers, and suppliers as an integrated framework.

My university education in the late 1960s was in industrial engineering and operations research, and I attribute to that foundation my thinking during my work career about how organizations work as a set of intermeshed systems—like linked drive-gear teeth in a machine. In some ways, I am glad that, for a while after I graduated from my university, operations research was not broadly practiced and computers were not yet sufficiently powerful to process and store data. Otherwise, my career might have been narrowly focused on solving interesting problems appreciated only by mathematically trained specialists. Instead, as I was exposed to the deficiencies of traditional managerial accounting and performance measurement practices, I realized that these were challenges that were important to all managers around the world and that I could potentially contribute in a way to make a difference.

As a management consultant in the 1990s, my work assignments began to weave in strategy and nonfinancial performance measures. That initially led me to realize that cost management must occur in a broader context—that being performance management. My 2004 book on this topic reflected my observations from my work experiences and from some exceptional people I have been fortunate to interact with.

Since 2004, I have annually averaged visiting roughly 30 international cities, presenting seminars on enterprise performance management, meeting with commercial and public sector executives, and dialoging with management consultants. I have been so fortunate. I am a careful observer of what I see, and somehow I developed a knack for explaining complicated things in a way that people can understand them.