Search results

This paper uses the results of a questionnaire survey to conduct exploratory research into the importance of product costs in decision-making. The results of the research reveal that product costs are at least important in selling price, make-or-buy, cost reduction, product design, evaluating new production process and product discontinuation decisions. Product costs that were used directly in decision-making were more important than those that were used as attention directing information and they were more important in product mix, output level and product discontinuation decisions in continuous production processes manufacturing. In general, the importance of product costs in decision-making did not vary between the methods used to allocate and assign overheads to product costs, and it was not related to operating unit size, product differentiation, competition and the level of satisfaction with the product costing system.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the interactions between accounting and marketing activities in a Taiwanese telecommunication firm by demonstrating the dramatic impact that improved costing methods had on the firm’s customer portfolio management activities and consequently on the firm’s bottom line.

The paper presents a case study of a firm in the highly competitive telecommunications industry in Taiwan. The case study was constructed by interviewing key individuals within the organization over an extended period and supplementing those reports with an analysis of internal company documents.

The firm dramatically increased profitability through the integration of activity-based costing into their customer portfolio framework requiring marketing and accounting functions to work closely together. In this rapidly evolving market, cost allocation and customer portfolio management are indispensable. Identifying accurate costs and keeping key customers is a critical issue for the case company. While theoretically the approach is simple, in practice considerable hurdles needed to be overcome.

While considerable literature suggests that customer profitability drives the management of an organization’s customer portfolio, critical to the success of such an endeavor is the accurate calculation and allocation of costs to individual customers. As an interdisciplinary study, this paper provides insights for both accounting and marketing highlighting their reliance on each other in a sound firm. The results of this paper will serve as a supplement to past customer portfolio management research as well as a reference for any firm seeking to enhance their approach to portfolio management.

To provide an overview of research published in the management accounting literature on methods for cost management in new product development, such as a target costing, life cycle costing, component commonality, and modular design.

The structured literature search covered papers about 15 different cost management methods published in 40 journals in the period 1990–2013.

The search yielded a sample of 113 different papers. Many contained information about more than one method, and this yielded 149 references to specific methods. The number of references varied strongly per cost management method and per journal. Target costing has received by far the most attention in the publications in our sample; modular design, component commonality, and life cycle costing were ranked second and joint third. Most references were published in Management Science; Management Accounting Research; and Accounting, Organizations and Society. The results were strongly influenced by Management Science and Decision Science, because cost management methods with an engineering background were published above average in these two journals (design for manufacturing, component commonality, modular design, and product platforms) while other topics were published below average in these two journals.

The scope of this review is accounting research. Future work could review the research on cost management methods in new product development published outside accounting.

The paper centers on methods for cost management, which complements reviews that focused on theoretical constructs of management accounting information and its use.

The paper provides an overview of research published in the innovation and operations management (IOM) literature on 15 methods for cost management in new product development, and it provides a comparison to an earlier review of the management accounting (MA) literature (Wouters & Morales, 2014).

This structured literature search covers papers published in 23 journals in IOM in the period 1990–2014.

The search yielded a sample of 208 unique papers with 275 results (one paper could refer to multiple cost management methods). The top 3 methods are modular design, component commonality, and product platforms, with 115 results (42%) together. In the MA literature, these three methods accounted for 29%, but target costing was the most researched cost management method by far (26%). Simulation is the most frequently used research method in the IOM literature, whereas this was averagely used in the MA literature; qualitative studies were the most frequently used research method in the MA literature, whereas this was averagely used in the IOM literature. We found a lot of papers presenting practical approaches or decision models as a further development of a particular cost management method, which is a clear difference from the MA literature.

This review focused on the same cost management methods, and future research could also consider other cost management methods which are likely to be more important in the IOM literature compared to the MA literature. Future research could also investigate innovative cost management practices in more detail through longitudinal case studies.

This review of research on methods for cost management published outside the MA literature provides an overview for MA researchers. It highlights key differences between both literatures in their research of the same cost management methods.

For certain consumer durables, such as automobiles, warranty policies involve two attributes. These could be the time elapsed since sale of the product and usage of the product at a given point in time. Warranty may be invoked by the consumer if both time and usage are within specified warranty parameters when a product failure occurs. In this chapter, we assume that usage and product age are related through a random variable, the usage rate, which may have a certain probabilistic distribution as influenced by consumer behavior patterns. Additionally, product failure rate is influenced by the usage rate and product age. The integrated model includes expected unit warranty costs, expected unit research and development costs, and expected unit production costs. It is assumed that in production, there is a learning effect with time. A multiobjective model is incorporated with the objectives being market share and proportion of expected warranty costs relative to total manufacturing expenditures per unit. The goals could be conflicting in nature. The problem then is to determine the warranty policy parameters while attaining certain desirable values of the two objectives.

Organizational scholars increasingly appreciate the role of categories as bases of order or “cognitive infrastructures” in markets. Yet they construe categories as disciplinary devices. They understand category formation, implementation, and revision as the purview of professionals. And they tie those processes to notions of institutional development that sharply distinguish settled from unsettled or disordered eras. We challenge these conceptions through a historical study of how manufacturers, associations, and cost accountants broke from the disciplinary functions of accounting categories underlying mass production to create new categorical schemes devoted to learning, innovation, and improvement. Reformers reconfigured the uses of categories in markets, mobilizing classifications to spark reflection, experimentation, and improvement among firms by perturbing taken-for-granted assumptions. They also redesigned the practices of producing, implementing, and revising categories. Manufacturers themselves produced and routinely revised classifications through collective deliberation, while accountants served as their consultants, rather than autonomous authorities who monopolized category formation and implementation. In so doing, reformers forged foundations for upgrading markets and fostering competition based on innovation and improvement in a variety of industries. Based on these findings, we extend existing research beyond categorical imperatives to highlight how categories also serve as cognitive infrastructures for learning, discovery, and innovation in markets.

The essential investments in new product development (NPD) made by industrial companies entail effective management of NPD activities. In this context, performance measurement is one of the means that can be employed in the pursuit of effectiveness.

This paper shows that consumer preference heterogeneity affects whether multinational firms serve local markets via imports or local production. Firms are least likely to choose local production over imports for product varieties that have relatively inelastic demand because transport costs have a smaller impact on the firm’s local profits for these products. The results suggest that there is complementarity between centralized production, with local market access via imports, and strategies that maintain low price elasticities at the brand level, such as advertising and within-brand product proliferation. A partial equilibrium study of the laundry detergent industry in Western Europe illustrates how firms and consumers interact at different levels of transport costs and reveals the product varieties that are most and least likely to be manufactured locally when transport costs are high.