Generally it is recognized that strategic cost management techniques gives positive effect on business performance. However these techniques may lead increasing additional expenses of new system set up, control system changes, and employee training. A...
Generally it is recognized that strategic cost management techniques gives positive effect on business performance. However these techniques may lead increasing additional expenses of new system set up, control system changes, and employee training. Also effects of these techniques could be different based on individual firm's characteristics of organization, resource, and environment. Accordingly, this paper grasps firm characteristics that affect introduction and usage of strategic cost management techniques and analyzes the structural influence of techniques on business performance by including attributes of individual firm's production and performance evaluation system. Research results and suggestions are as follows.
First, it is analyzed that the innovative organization characteristic and the differential strategy of small and medium sized firms are significant factors of the usage of strategic cost management techniques. The innovative organization characteristic is regarded as an important factor of elevating the efficiency of high production technology by increasing the usage of techniques. The differential strategy looks upon to be the efficient strategic device of meeting business uncertainty and therefore firms may aggressively utilize these techniques to adapt new environmental changes. On the other hand, both market competition and automation level are no significant factors of the usage of strategic cost management techniques. It is suggested that small and medium sized firms do not fully consider the market competition factor in utilizing these techniques and though the level of factory automation increases no suitable cost management system is adapted and cost managing endeavors are still not sufficient.
Second, the usage of strategic cost management techniques gives no direct impact on business performance but significant indirect impact on the performance through production attributes such as cost cut, quality improvement, and increase in process flexibility and also through the usage of non financial performance indices. Therefore the usage of techniques ultimately contributes to performance increase, but the performance increase result in by the function of performance generating variables of production and performance evaluation system attributes.
Third, the usage of strategic cost management gives significant effect on production attributes and production attributes also give significant effect on the business performance. Consequently the usage of strategic cost management techniques may contribute to performance increase through the improvement of production attributes.
Fourth, it is analyzed that the usage of strategic cost management techniques increases utilizing non financial performance index but increasing non financial performance indices decreases business performance. This result could be caused by substantial operating problems of performance management system of small and medium sized firms, and therefore suggests the necessity of additional researches of the usage of strategic cost management techniques in relation to operating performance evaluation system and consequent business performance.
Overall results of this study would be practical guides of constructing a suitable cost management system of individual company and be useful for developing ways of substantial performance increase. This study also presents a structural equation model that is useful for analyzing the relationship of the usage of strategic cost management techniques and business performance together with related variables. Based on these results and the methodology of this study, future research for the usage of strategic cost management techniques for improving firms' business performance and developing efficient operating methods of overall performance management system is expected to be more activated.