Many traditional costing systems:

		trace manufacturing overhead to individual activities and require the development of numerous activity-costing rates.
		write off manufacturing overhead as an expense of the current period.
		combine widely varying elements of overhead into a single cost pool.
		use a host of different cost drivers (e.g., number of production setups, inspection hours, orders processed) to improve the accuracy of product costing.
		produce results far superior to those achieved with activity-based costing.