Cart Preview
    Strategic Cost Analysis and Decision Making

    Learn about both basic and advanced financial management to make your business more profitable

    Are you effectively handling your business financial management and business decision making tools? What about your information system management? Do you know the significance of taking a balanced scorecard approach? Or the best methods for project implementation and strategy implementation?

    Today’s financial manager and other decision makers have a lot to worry about to improve a company’s bottom line. The data you gather can be useless if you don’t know what it means or how to apply it.

    This financial management course focuses on both basic and advanced techniques of financial management and decision making. Topics covered include:

    • Information systems management and decision making criteria
    • Financial management solutions
    • Rational decision making based on the numbers and decision making strategies
    • How to do a cost analysis

    Learn through doing

    This intensive two-day course places a heavy emphasis on implementation. You’ll participate in a highly interactive environment that combines discussion, group practice sessions, modeling and case studies, and provides ample opportunity to learn from your peers as well as leading university faculty and industry experts.

    Who should attend?

    This course is designed for:

    • Profit center managers
    • Controllers
    • Accounting and financial professionals

    Whether you currently have an integrated management information system in place or are ready to build one, this course will deliver the resources you need to create the most effective system possible. To ensure immediate buy-in, we strongly recommend that you send a team of your firm’s operations and financial personnel. Professionals from all industries will benefit—our course integrates a broad range of examples from both manufacturing and service industry sectors.

    “Strategic Cost Analysis and Decision Making" is focused on internal information for decision making, internal cost analysis and assessment. The skills you learn here will help you:

    • Assess profitability. Determine the true contribution of each profit center, product line and customer.
    • Determine if lean accounting is applicable for you. Identify what is meant by lean accounting, and learn how organizations are applying lean techniques to their financial management systems.
    • Ensure that your management and financial systems are coordinated. Don’t let a disconnect between authority and responsibility short-circuit the effectiveness of your information system. We’ll show you how to avoid potential pitfalls.
    • Taking a balanced scorecard approach. Learn how to identify and apply a set of metrics that balances various needs and constituencies.
    • Evaluate the cost/benefit of operational options. Create metrics that help you to determine whether outsourcing is a benefit or an unnecessary expense.

    Information for decision making

    • Identify key financial and operational data
    • Evaluate non-quantitative factors
    • Learn how to take a balanced scorecard approach that meets the needs of multiple internal/external groups
    • Discover techniques to assess outsourcing alternatives
    • Use financial information in supporting pricing decisions
    • Learn effective use of non-financial measures

    Profit center analysis

    • Analyze product line profitability
    • Analyze customer profitability
    • Use profit centers as management tools
    • Assess organizational considerations

    Direct costing

    • Compare direct costing to full absorption
    • Define and apply direct cost concepts
    • Examine marginal income concepts and applications
    • Link to activity-based cost management

    Lean accounting

    • Define the purpose and applications of lean accounting
    • Analyze how you might apply the concepts of lean to your management information systems
    • Explore lean accounting applications through examples

    Activity-based cost management

    • Identify significant activities that add value or drive cost
    • Learn how standards are used in today’s lean and ABC environments

    A proactive approach to flexible budgeting

    • Understanding the value of an operations approach to budgeting
    • Building a budget on a direct cost basis
    • Developing a budget that can flex for analyzing actual results

    Capital expenditure proposals

    • Importance and theory of capital budgeting
    • Methods of evaluating projects
      • Net present value
      • Discounted cash flow
      • Payback
    • Working with project sponsors

    Charles A. Krueger, C.P.A., C.I.A., is associate professor and director of the finance program for the Wisconsin School of Business Executive Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Krueger takes an operational approach to developing and applying financial information in decision making, directing profit centers, and implementing innovative cost management.