| 1. | Management Control Systems | 10% |
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| | • | Control Systems within the framework of the organization | | • | The application of control systems and related theory to the design of management accounting control systems | | • | Structure and operation of management accounting control systems | | • | Behavioural consequences of using management accounting controls); | | • | Variation in control needs and systems dependent on organizational structure | | • | Management accounting system - need for detailed costing, overhead allocation and budgeting, identification of non-value adding activities in the accounting function |
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| 2. | Operations Management | 15% |
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| | • | An overview of operations strategy and its importance | | • | Systems used in operations management: Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP), Optimised Production Technologies (OPT), Just-in-Time (JIT) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). | | • | Use of the Intranet in information management | | • | Strategies for balancing capacity and demand including level capacity | | • | Demand management strategies. | | • | Benchmarking and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). |
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| 3. | Cost Planning and Analysis for Competitive Advantage | 25% |
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| | • | Value analysis and quality function deployment. | | • | The benefits of just-in-time production, total quality management and theory of constraints | | • | Kaizen costing, continuous improvement and cost of quality reporting. | | • | Learning curves and their use in predicting product/service costs, derivation of learning rate and learning index. | | • | Activity-based management in the analysis of overhead and its use in improving the efficiency of repetitive overhead activities. | | • | Multi-product break-even analysis, including break-even and profit/volume charts, contribution/sales ratio, margin of safety etc. | | • | Simple product mix analysis in situations where there are limitations on product/service demand and one other production constraint. | | • | Target costing. | | • | Life cycle costing and implications for marketing strategies. | | • | Value chain and supply chain management | | • | Strategic Total Cost Management |
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| 4. | Treatment of Uncertainty in Decision Making | 20% |
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| | • | The nature of risk and uncertainty. | | • | Sensitivity analysis in decision modeling and the use of computer software for 'what if' analysis. | | • | Assignment of probabilities to key variables in decision models. | | • | Analysis of probabilistic models and interpretation of distributions of project outcomes. | | • | Expected value tables and the value of information. | | • | Decision trees for multi-stage decision problems. |
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| 5. | Enterprise performance measurement systems | 15% |
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| | • | Balanced Score Card, EVA | | • | Segment Performance |
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| 6. | Quality Management | 15% |
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| | • | Approaches to quality management, including Total Quality Management (TQM), Statistical Quality Control (SQC) . | | • | The use of benchmarking in quality measurement and improvement. | | • | Practices of continuous improvement (e.g. Quality circles, Kaizen, 5S, 6 Sigma). | | • | Different methods of quality measurement (i.e. operational, financial and customer measures) | | • | Contemporary developments in quality management. | | • | External quality standards (e.g. the various ISO standards appropriate to products and organizations). | | • | Global awards for best practices and business performance |
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