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Management Accounting Systems

In: Business and Management

Submitted By googleman1
Words 3699
Pages 15
Executive Summary

The company’s profits are falling and there is a build up of inventory within the production process. This report considers three management systems which could rectify the situation. Considering Theory of Constraints, Just In Time and Programme Evaluation and Review Technique, the report recommends that more information regarding the cause of the problems is undertaken, and a suitable programme of revaluation of the business processes is undertaken.

Introduction

The role of management accounting in the organisation has become so much more that the reporting of the score to managers (Hansen, Mouritsen 2006). In the wake of the decline of Western Manufacturing and the relevance crisis of management accounting to modern business as outlined by Kaplan and Johnson in ‘Relevance Lost’, the traditional cost accounting approach has been largely replaced by alternative methodologies (Kee, Schmidt 2000). The role of the management accounting in the modern firm is not only to report the score, but to seek to influence the score by using techniques and theoretical approaches to improve the business processes. As such it is important for managers to understand the use and usefulness of a variety of alternatives to traditional accounting approaches, especially traditional cost accounting and look to introduce other techniques which may have practical advantages for the firm (DUGDALE, JONES 1998). There is no one size fits all approach which will work in any case and the application of cost accounting can and will always provide key information about how the business is doing in terms of its goals. Indeed many of the newer techniques focus on particular applications within industry and each of them has something to offer the firm in terms of improving the business processes (Plenert 1993). This report considers three approaches in the context of

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