April 2018

STARK RAVINGS
The Newsletter of the IMA Canton Chapter

April 2018

http://canton.imanet.org

Jeff Walters, President
Cullen Bahler, Editor

In this issue:

This Month's Tech Sessions
Strategic Finance Tips
Webinar Schedule
IMA Technical Sessions

 

Connect with Us!

Do you have info to share with our chapter? Email it to info@cantonima.org. If you wish a colleague to receive these announcements, send an email to info@cantonima.org and we will add them to our announcement list.

Please Join Us!
Tuesday, April 17th | 5:00 - 7:30 pm
The Canton Brewery: 120 3rd St. NW, Canton OH 44702 (directions)

Deadline registration: Friday, April 13th, 5:00 pm

Pre-Dinner Technical Session (5:00 pm - 6:00 pm) and
Dinner and Networking (6:00 pm - 7:30 pm):
Networking at the Canton Brewing Company

Please use the following link to email your reservation and meal choice from the following hand-tossed pizzas: 

  1. THE CLASSIC - PEPPERONI & CHEESE
  2. THE PORKER  - HOUSE SMOKED PULLED PORK, HOUSE-MADE BBQ SAUCE & PROVOLONE
  3. THE FAVORITE - HOUSE RED, CHEESE, PEPPERONI, ONION & BANANA PEPPERS
  4. THE QUEEN (MARGHERITA) - ROASTED TOMATO, BASIL, FRESH MOZZARELLA, OLIVE OIL & GRATED PARMESAN
  5. SAUSAGE & PEPPERS - HOUSE RED, SAUTÉED BELL PEPPERS & ONIONS, ITALIAN SAUSAGE, PROVOLONE

    Be sure to note your name, company and meal choice on the email.
    The cost is $30 for members/guests and $15 for students. 
    Click here to email Chris Holmes with your meal choice

Once you have emailed your meal choice, you can click here to pre-pay or you can pay by credit card at the meeting.

Strategic Finance
Maintaining Relevance in the Digital Age

By Raef Lawson, Ph.D., CMA, CSCA, CPA, CFP, CFA, and Larry R. White, CMA, CSCA, CFM, CPA, CGFM

relevanceThe accounting profession, like many others, faces challenges as disruptive technologies change its practices at an ever increasing rate. Technologies such as machine learning and robotic process automation are already eliminating the need for many entry-level positions, while these and other digital tools promise to soon make many higher-level positions redundant.

This calls into question the future role of the management accountant. A common line of thought is that by acquiring competencies in areas such as predictive analytics and by exploiting Big Data, management accountants can achieve the role of “business partner,” assisting in and supporting senior management in strategy formulation, validation, and implementation. Yet others—including those in operations, HR, and marketing—can make similar claims about the ability to offer strategic insights by exploiting the new sources of data available. So what added value do we as management accountants bring to the table? It’s that only management accountants can combine a holistic view of operations, mastery of quantitative and technological skills, and a unique understanding of costs—their behavior, their relevance, and their use in decision making.

But how well are we management accountants currently serving this role? Unfortunately, not well at all. An IMA® (Institute of Management Accountants) study of senior finance professionals found that while 80% believed that the Finance function adds a great deal of value to their organization, only 22% believed that those outside of Finance saw its role as adding a great deal of value (see http://bit.ly/2pd8S8i).

This lack of perceived value in the information provided by Finance isn’t unfounded. An ongoing survey by IMA’s Managerial Costing Task Force of operations and supply chain professionals found that slightly more than half of the respondents believe that their organizations’ cost information system fails to provide an accurate assessment of costs for internal decision making. Forty-four percent agree with the statement that “Our cost information is not helpful to me in my work.” And 83% believe that the benefits of improving their costing systems outweigh the cost of doing so. (See “IMA’s Managerial Costing Task Force” for more about the task force itself.)

Why is there a disconnect between the value we believe we provide to others and the value they perceive we provide? In large measure, it’s due to the information we provide. While the Finance function in many companies focuses on preparing costing information and financial reports according to Generally Accepted Accounting ­Principles (GAAP) or similar standards, other functional areas understand that managing operations based on such information is inadequate for decision support, planning, and control—and are finding alternate sources of information for making decisions.

FIX THE PROFESSION, FIX COST MODELINGrelevance2

The management accounting profession is in need of a framework to support the development of costing information that reflects economic reality and enhances internal decision support. IMA’s Conceptual Framework for Managerial Costing (CFMC) is such a framework (http://bit.ly/2IQ2eO8). It identifies the principles, concepts, and constraints that need to be addressed and considered when creating a costing approach for an organization’s decision support. It isn’t a method—it’s a framework to assess an organization’s costing needs and to evaluate methods and systems against an organization’s alternative solutions.

The CFMC replaces advertising hype with clear principles and concepts. For example, activity-based costing (ABC) can be implemented with an immense range of modeling techniques. At the simplistic end, an ABC solution may create as many distortions (for example, allocations of fixed costs) as insights. As an organization incorporates more CFMC concepts into its ABC solution, however, models generate greater insights and less distortion (but also require a higher level of modeling knowledge and systems support).

The CFMC focuses on two principles (see Figure 1). The first is causality (or cause and effect), the foundational principle for creating better models that support internal decision making. Managerial costing models need to reflect the reality of resources and processes in the organization. The second principle is analogy, the logical use of information for decisions. The CFMC moves costing out a method-centric environment—where methodologies like ABC, Theory of Constraints (TOC), lean accounting, total cost of ownership, standard costing, and others compete for customers, consultants, software vendors, and managers—to a knowledge base grounded in principles and concepts.

Most cost models that accountants use are simply financial models that seek to generally reflect operations and resources. Models based on the CFMC focus first on building an operational model, then costing it in a manner that reflects causal relationships, and then applying resource costs without clear causal relationships to outputs in a manner that’s appropriate for decision making. In other words, the CFMC requires that a cost model be an overlay of an operational model of an organization’s resources and processes.

An example of an incorrectly applied noncausal cost is excess capacity in a work group or resource, such as a resource capacity for which there is no demand for creating additional output. The job of a good operations manager is to become more efficient and effective, which means he or she will create excess capacity. This should be recognized positively, but how often is it? Typically, a manager is penalized for not keeping the work unit busy, or the costs of idle capacity are applied to the work unit’s output, thereby negating the efficiency improvement. Preferably, excess capacity costs should be applied to the business or, in the case of salable products or services, perhaps applied to the sales and marketing area since it failed to generate sufficient demand.

Increasingly, relevance for management accountants means focusing more on forward-looking information. Creating such information puts a premium on understanding causal operational resources, processes, market relationships, and more. The models needed to support projections must incorporate and reflect an organization’s operating model before determining the monetary impact of a given decision, trend, scenario, or projection. IMA’s CFMC is the only framework for creating decision-supportive models with principles, concepts, and constraints that apply equally to financial and nonfinancial modeling.

This is an abstract. For the full article, click here: http://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/april-2018-maintaining-relevance-in-the-digital-age/

Webinar Schedule

You will earn CMA and CPE credits when you attend any live webinar. Replay webinars are available in the archive but do not earn credits. Advance registration is recommended—IMA webinars are popular and fill up quickly.

The CMA Exam: Test-Taking Tips and Strategies
Inside Talk
April 10, 2018 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

New Lease Accounting: Business Impacts You May Not Be Thinking Of
Inside Talk
April 12, 2018 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

Beyond the Budget: How to Make the Move to Rolling Forecasts
Inside Talk
April 18, 2018 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

The Case for Continuous Accounting
Inside Talk
April 25, 2018 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

Transformational Leadership
Leadership Academy
May 01, 2018 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM

Register for Any Webinar

Join Us at IMA Technical Sessions

2017-2018 tech sessions will be held at Kozmo's Grille with the exceptions noted below. There are two hour-long sessions beginning at 5:00 and 6:30 and dinner in between.

  • April 17, 2018
  • May 15, 2018

Cost for dinner is $30 regardless of the location. Please look for invite emails with registration information prior to each meeting.

Schedule:

  • Social/Networking at 4:45 pm
  • Pre-Dinner Technical Session at 5:00 pm
  • Dinner at 6:00 pm
  • Post-Dinner Technical Session at 6:30 pm

© 2010-2018 Institute of Management Accountants - Canton Ohio Chapter # 155. All rights reserved.
info@cantonima.org

The mission of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) is to provide a forum for research, practice development, education,
knowledge sharing, and the advocacy of the highest ethical and best business practices in management accounting and finance.
Please join us as we promote this mission in the greater Canton, Ohio, area.