Activity-based costing Multiple Choice is a powerful tool for gathering competitive intelligence on a rival company's value chain, enabling analysts to classify a rival's primary and support activities. applies benchmarking techniques to develop cost estimates for the value chain activities of each major rival. involves the creation of an accounting system that assigns a company's expenses to whichever activity in a company's value chain is responsible for creating the cost. involves determining which value chain activities represent primary activities and which represent support activities. is a tool for identifying the activities that represent variable and fixed costs