Strategic Cost Management

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.