Cost Management Strategies for Business Decisions

Cost Management, Strategies for Business Decisions

OBJECTIVES

• How to add value to the bottom line
• Enhance cost awareness and its relationship with strategy
• Describe specific cost analysis and performance measurement techniques
• Learning how to get from cost to strategy then to performance measurement
• Broadening the management accounting knowledge
• Deliver more timely and useful information to decision makers
• Identify and manage key financial and non-financial indicators for the business

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

• All business professionals and sectors of industry, irrespective of functional responsibilities, where personnel have to plan and cost, and who are responsible for strategic analysis
• Other professionals who would like to increase skills from having the opportunity to consider new ideas and methods
• Personnel on a fast-track development

COURSE OUTLINE

Day 1 – Introducing the linkages between strategy and costing

• Managing contemporary organisation
• Strategic Plan, Budgeting, Costing and Management Control
• Management Accounting for organizational control systems
• Responsibility accounting and the process-view
• The context for costing
• The Budget and its role for achieving organizational targets
• What is it the situation in your organization?

Day 2 – Cost analysis and classifications

• Cost terms and classification
• Inventoriable vs. period costs
• Manufacturing vs non-manufacturing costs
• Variable vs. Fixed costs (CVP analysis)
• Direct vs. indirect cost
• Under-costing and Over-costing problems

Day 3 – From cost accounting to management control

• Cost allocation: traditional costing and activity-based costing (ABC)
• From traditional budgeting to Activity-based budgeting (ABB)
• Activity-based management
• Decentralized organizations
• Cost/Profit/Investment centres
• Transfer-pricing issues

Day 4 – Flexible budgets and variance analysis

• The features of budgetary control
• Define the master budget and explain its major benefits to an organization
• Describe the difference between a static budget and a flexible budget
• Compute flexible-budget variances and sales-volume variances
• Explain why standard costs are often used in variance analysis
• Integrate continuous improvement into variance analysis

Day 5 – Linking strategy to actions: Beyond costing

• Shortcomings of traditional approaches to measurement
• The Balanced Scorecard: linking Strategy to Performance Measurement
• Financial perspective, Customer perspective
• Internal Business Process perspective, Learning and growth perspective
• Developing and adapting scorecard