How can you as a management accountant help your organization to improve quality and achieve timely product deliveries?

The fundamental knowledge to help answer the question will be using “Horngren’s Cost Accounting” text, to help facilitate the discussion
 
The recent trend as shown the following statement to be more prevalent: The CFO Organization is often the direct line of communication with the CEO and upper management.
 
Before we continue, the textbooks define a management account as a staff function who works as a business partner, to help reach an organization reach their goals, through the principles of management accounting. The following are ways a management account can help an organization:

• You can help formulate strategy by answering questions like – Who are the most important customers, what critical capability does the firm possess, and how do we deliver the most value to consumers. This is done by performing cost-benefit analysis. Additionally, you can help address the bargaining powers of customers and suppliers by helping evaluate the costs. Moreover, and maybe the most important, is there adequate cash available to fund strategy. Cash on hand to ensure operations helps determine future investment and the pace of the strategy implementation.

 

• Be able to work well cross functionally – Management accountants are SME or Subject Matter Experts. They can help address the technical questions, while being able to work well with teams, learn about departmental issues, and bring it back to the organizational goals. They can do this all while understanding motivations, and then show empathy, while articulating the financial position of the firm.

 

• Fact-Based Stewards – Management accountants can make “adversarial” positions, by raising the tough questions by considering what the right long-term plan (directed by upper management). They are responsible for creating budgets, forecasts, and performance tracking reports, therefore, they can properly speak on behalf on the financials.

 

• Clear Communicators – Management accountants can work cross-functionally, therefore, be able to speak different “corporate lingo” or “corporate languages”. They can properly communication information amongst “multidisciplinary teams”. Therefore, they are facilitators of profitability.

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• TQM “Total Quality Management” – This includes being able to produce analysis that cover total factor productivity and total overhead (these are only a couple of the many analyses that can be used). Such as cost-benefit analyses. For instance, a management accountant can prepare detailed OPEX cost comparisons to determine more efficient pieces of equipment.