Designing Strategic Cost Systems

Offering a multidisciplinary roadmap for the design, development, and implementation of a strategic cost system, this book shows how to design a cost system to become a more effective decision-making tool and a source of competitive advantage for the organisation. It describes how to structure a cost systems design project and discuss the issues that should be addressed upfront from a management, operations, and costing perspective. Includes a URL site containing key terms and helpful Excel templates. Highlights the logistics of putting together and managing the project team. Addresses the technical and political issues that may arise as the project unfolds.

This collection of readings and cases analyzes the defects with existing, traditional cost management systems, and shows how to design systems that will provide value to a wide range of organizations.

Providing valuable insight into the latest practice and design philosophies, this collection of readings and cases analyzes the defects that exist with traditional cost management systems, and shows how to design systems that will benefit a wide range of organizations. Opens with a thorough introduction to cost systems - with discussions on their use, product and process costing, operational control, financial reporting, and strategic relevance - and explores target costing, and ABC and product design and development. Considers the foundations of activity-based costing, including its necessity for companies, cost hierarchy, and activity attributes, and dedicates entire sections to the use of cost systems for managing customer and supplier relationships, and for designing and developing new products. Second Edition features include many new cases and a critical study of service industry and activity-based budgeting. For management consultants, CFO's, and controllers.

An indispensable guide for managers concerned with cost, strategy, and business re-engineering. Experts on the strategic use of cost data, the authors show how stategic cost management is revolutionizing accounting practices in leading companies. Includes numerous examples. 120 line drawings.

Starting from the economic modelling of the organization, this innovative book proposes a mapping of all types (conventional and ABC) of cost systems currently in use. Design and relevance are formalized using a short list of parameters. The theoretical proposition is illustrated, through 19 systems built on a unique database.

This book covers recent developments in process systems engineering (PSE) for efficient resource use in biomass conversion systems. It provides an overview of process development in biomass conversion systems with focus on biorefineries involving the production and coproduction of fuels, heating, cooling, and chemicals. The scope includes grassroots and retrofitting applications. In order to reach high levels of processing efficiency, it also covers techniques and applications of natural-resource (mass and energy) conservation. Technical, economic, environmental, and social aspects of biorefineries are discussed and reconciled. The assessment scales vary from unit- to process- and life-cycle or supply chain levels. The chapters are written by leading experts from around the world, and present an integrated set of contributions. Providing a comprehensive, multi-dimensional analysis of various aspects of bioenergy systems, the book is suitable for both academic researchers and energy professionals in industry.

The principle aim of this collection is to give the reader some understanding of why the design of management accounting systems needs to be rethought to meet the needs of strategic management, and to indicate how this might be done. The emergence of strategic cost management is a recent phenomenon and there is, as yet, no unified view of what it is or how it will develop in the future. This book aims to clarify the meaning of SCM, or strategic management accounting (SMA) as it is also known, by defining strategy as the long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of a course of action and allocation of resources necessary for carrying out those goals. It presents a variety of views, each offering a broader, more narrowed down, or more subject specific idea of the actual definition of SCM. Key differences between conventional management accounting and SCM are highlighted, and the ambiguity of cost reduction in relation to how some writers have defined SCM is discussed.