Something like activity based costing or ABC comes into the scene when we are talking about some sort of production activity. Production essentially is a composition of procedures, which use materials, services etc to produce the end result, which normally are sellable goods. As such the company purchases materials, buys services, develops internal expenses (personnel, asset related depreciation etc) which usually are designated to their cost center on the income statement.

Although cost centers are essentially required to measure company’s performance in different departments, to help keeping costs on certain level and so on, it does not show you if certain procedure could be done more efficiently.
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In a small company there is usually an admin team comprising of one accountant, assistant and manager, a sales team and perhaps a production and logistics team. While the last two are considerable in larger companies, it shows that within one company there may be numerous departments.

Although those departments vary depending on the business type and market sector, some of those are more or less described as cost centers and others profit centers. As the name suggests, cost centers are generating cost and profit centers generate revenue. Since they are within one company, profit centers take care of the revenue streams and cost centers are there to provide support for profit centers by making the products, organizing logistics, advertising, maintenance etc.
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