ANALYSING COST FOR STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT DECISIONS
OVERVIEW
In an organization, controlling the costs is vital in supporting future strategic decisions, planning, and monitoring progress. Strategy formulation, overall organizational performance and budgetary process are all deeply interconnected with cost analysis. Therefore, it is essential to depict the cost behavior to produce realistic plans and budgets. This way, suitable financial and non-financial resources are available to the business. This strategic management decision course intends to improve and support all organizations. This program will enable all participants to use and control the traditional tools of cost analysis as well as learn the advanced approaches that assist in making more valuable and significant financial and operational decisions.
COURSE OUTLINE
This course will cover the following course outline:
- Costing
- Performance Measurement
- Budgeting
- Strategic Management
- Performance Measurement Techniques
- Operational Objectives
- Cost Analysis Concepts
ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA
This course is intended for corporate practitioners that include:
- Consultants
- Managers
- Supervisors
- Employees
- Specialist
And all the other corporate employees who want to improve their functional competence and expertise. The business heads and functional leaders involved in the company’s decision-making and cost analysis are highly encouraged to register and apply.
COURSE STRUCTURE AND AGENDA
THE LINKAGES BETWEEN COSTING & STRATEGY
- Understand the meaning of Cost
- Importance of Cost awareness
- Why is Cost Analysis essential for all modern organizations?
- Strategy and Cost Linkage
- Strategic Plan and Budgeting
- Costing and Management Control
- Management Accounting for organizational systems
- Context for costing, the budget and its role for the company
- Reality Check – How is your organization doing now
- Practical Case Study
COST ANALYSIS PRINCIPLES
- Understand Cost terms and classification
- Define Inventoriable vs. period costs
- Manufacturing vs non-manufacturing costs
- Variable vs. Fixed costs (CVP analysis)
- Define Direct and indirect cost
- Under-costing and Over-costing problems
- Analyze problems and Examples
- Practical Case Study
TRANSITIONING FROM COST ACCOUNTING TO MANAGEMENT CONTROL
- Defining and understanding Cost allocation
- Traditional costing and activity-based costing (ABC)
- How to transition from traditional budgeting to Activity-based budgeting (ABB)
- What is Activity-based management?
- What are Decentralized organizations?
- Cost/Profit/Investment centers
- What are Transfer-pricing issues?
- Practical Case Study
VARIANCE ANALYSIS & FLEXIBLE BUDGETS
- What is Variance and Variance Analysis?
- Key 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
- Demonstrate why standard costs are often used in variance analysis
- Integrate continuous improvement into variance analysis
- Practical Case Study
ACTION BEYOND COSTING
- How to linking strategy to actions?
- 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
- Practical Case Study
- Working Exercises