Part I: Now that you have made it through the course and learned several traditional managerial accounting and cost management techniques and concepts, the challenge in the future will be to apply these “tools” in your career. The purpose of Module 4 is to give you a reason to question the suitability of these tools (e.g. what tool should be used and when).
First, read the article entitled “Alphabet Soup: Good for You or an Indigestible Stew?” and then consider the following quote from The Goal, “[m]ost people haven’t been managing according to the goal.” Explain what you think is meant by this statement. Additionally, how do you think most companies deal with the issue of “bottlenecks”? Provide an example of how you have seen an organization cope with bottlenecks in a current or previous job.
Week 4 Discussion Part I
The statement “most people haven’t been managing according to the goal” is true. Corporate management and the board of directors commonly have different goals for the organization. Interest Discrepancy in corporate management occurs when each leader has different goals, objectives, and interests. Due to interest asymmetry in the management dynamic, it can be difficult to manage the company to achieve a common goal. Moreover, internal and external pressures on the organization, as well as prioritizing newly emerging issues, can divert management’s attention away from managing in alignment with a company goal. In this way, executives may find it difficult to lead their company due to the failure of the company to achieve its corporate objectives (Langfield-Smith, Thorne, and Hilton, 2018, p.12).
The “whirlwind” effect is the main cause of corporations’ inability to carry out their objectives. The daily tasks that the company must complete to operate the business are referred to as the “whirlwind”. The whirlwind has the potential to destroy the execution of larger goals. When an organization has too many goals, the goals are unclear, and there is no accountability for achieving the goals, leaders fail to manage appropriately (). The article “Alphabet Soup: Good for You or an Indigestible Stew?” contains several warnings, and one of them relates to this. The article offers advice on how businesses should approach implementing all of the “ABC” if they want to become global competitors. The majority of businesses today try to adopt the newest trends such as digitalization, just-in-time manufacturing, total quality management, etc. without giving any thought to how to manage the change successfully or check that it is in line with the business’s objectives.
In an organization, a bottleneck is a point where one part of the process restricts the entire process or value chain. This frequently leads to longer processing times, process stalls, or increased overstocking of materials. The company’s employees are directly impacted by bottlenecks because they are frequently under pressure from management or customers to remove them. However, identifying bottlenecks is first accomplished by bringing stakeholders of a business together to analyze the value chain and look for any step that indirectly reduces the overall value chain’s production capacity. How companies handle bottlenecks in their value chains varies. But in the majority of cases, businesses invest more money and resources to get around bottlenecks. This is especially true if consumer demand for a company’s goods or services increases too quickly and outpaces the company’s ability to meet demand. The Goal discusses how a company’s efforts to remove a bottleneck do not always result in successful process improvements, increased process efficiency, or higher company profits (Chen, Liu, Huang, and Dang, 2022, p.16).
Demand for one of our products is increasing rapidly in my current organization. We have filed with the FDA process by which we manufacture our product all over the world, and as with any manufacturing process, there are certain steps in the value chain where resource constraints reduce capacity and bottleneck our process. When faced with the challenge of scaling up to meet future customer demand, we discovered that existing process bottlenecks are adversely affecting our ability to meet future demand. Investing capital in the purchase, installation, and qualification of new resources will benefit us in the future, but the process will take time. To identify bottlenecks in our manufacturing process and create creative solutions that maintain our regulatory compliance to the manufacturing process we filed with the FDA, we have established multidisciplinary teams in Management, Quality, Formulation, Engineering, Maintenance, and Operational Excellence (Mizuno and Bodek, 2020, p.11). The multidisciplinary teams have been successful in quickly addressing major bottlenecks or lessening their impact on our manufacturing process. The equipment we have has helped to boost the production capacity at our manufacturing site.
References:
Chen, M., Liu, Q., Huang, S., & Dang, C. (2022). Environmental cost control system of manufacturing enterprises using artificial intelligence based on the value chain of the circular economy. Enterprise Information Systems, 16(8-9), 1856422.
Langfield-Smith, K., Thorne, H., & Hilton, R. W. (2018). Management accounting: Information for creating and managing value. Sydney: McGraw-Hill Education.
Mizuno, S., & Bodek, N. (2020). Management for quality improvement: The seven new QC tools. Productivity press.
