Cost Analysis to Support Strategic Decisions

• the cause-and-effect relationship among business strategy, operational objectives, measures and targets, and systems of performance measurement and reporting
• traditional techniques of cost analysis and control
• advanced costing and management techniques (ABC, ABB, ABM, target costing)
• overhead cost allocation & reduction
• the balanced scorecard construction and implementation

• 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 

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 organisation?

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
• Case study, problems and exercises

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
• Case study illustration