Cost Analysis to Support Strategic Decisions
Cost Analysis to Support Strategic Decisions
OBJECTIVES
- Enhance cost awareness and its relationship with strategy
- Describe specific cost analysis and performance measurement techniques
- Select the costing measurement system that works
- Select the systems of performance measurement that works
- Discuss real case studies
- From cost to strategy to performance measurement
- Broadening the management accounting knowledge
- Deliver more timely and useful information to decision makers
- Identify & manage key financial and non-financial indicators for the business
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
- All business disciplines 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 benefit from having the opportunity to consider new ideas and methods and personnel on a fast-track development
COURSE OUTLINE
DAY 1 – Introducing the linkages between strategy and costing
- Managing contemporary organization
- 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
- Problems and Examples – Case study illustration
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 centers
- Transfer-pricing issues
- Problems and Examples – Case study illustration
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