8. Strategic Control Flashcards
What are the 4 main purposes of a performance measurement system?
- Help determine progress
- Decide when corrective action is needed
- Set expectations between employers and employees
- Provide a yardstick for performance
What 3 factors influence the design of a performance measurement system?
- Environment (turbulent/stable)
- Strategy
- Business type
What are 3 the main benefits of using financial KPIs?
- Easy to gather data
- Enable comparison
- Well establihsed/understood
What are 3 the main limitations of using financial KPIs?
- Encourage short termist behaviour
- Involve some subjectivity
Is strategic management accounting more inward/outward and forward/backwards?
Outwards and forwards
What is strategic management accounting?
A form of traditional management accounting in which emphasis is placed on information which relates to factors external to the entity, as well as non financial and internally generated information
What 4 typical types of information does strategic management accountants use?
- Competitor analaysis
- Customer profitability analysis
- Support for pricing/other strategic decisions
- Portfolio analysis
What are critical success factors?
Components of strategy where the organisation must excel to outperform competition
What are the 4 sources of CSFs?
- The industry
- The company position
- The wider environment
- Temporal organisational factors (situations that require a response)
What are KPIs?
Measures of how good the organisation is in vital areas of performance, underpinning CSFs
What are the 4 perspectives of the balanced scorecard?
- Financial
- Customer
- Internal
- Innovation and Learning
What are the 4 disadvantages of the balanced scorecard?
- Large number of measures can make it difficult to see clearly
- Difficult to understand some measures
- Some measures may conflict
- May take attention away from maximisation of profit
What is strategy mapping?
A method which extends the balanced scorecard to give a clear visual representation of the primary roles of the org, with links to show the cause and effect of relationships between goals in the 4 quadrants. They show how lower level objectives feed into higher level outcomes
What is the performance pyramid?
5 levels of the organisation, each with their own KPIs but with links between them helping insure consistent performance
What does the performance pyramid aim to correct?
The tendency of many commercial organisations to focus on shareholders and other customers and ignore other stakeholders such as staff, suppliers and the government
What are the 2 horizontal elements of the performance pyramid?
Internal (financial) and external (non financial) effectiveness