A key requirement of a management accounting system in business is that it must provide information that helps management decision making. The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed a revolution in manufacturing practices and rapid changes in the business env...
A key requirement of a management accounting system in business is that it must provide information that helps management decision making. The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed a revolution in manufacturing practices and rapid changes in the business environment. It is said that these changes have exposed various problems in traditional cost and management accounting systems.
In the United States and Japan, lost relevance of traditional management accounting information has been studied and discussed in various ways, and recently rich results of analytical and empirical researches have been provided. On the basis of these research results, innovative cost and management accounting techniques have been proposed and implemented in management practices to regain the relevance of management accounting information. On the contrary, in Korea, issues in management accounting theories and practices has been studied on a limited basis.
The purpose of this study is to examine the practical application of major traditional and modern management accounting issues in Korean manufacturing companies. The results of this study should be useful in helping to improve management accounting practices in changing environment and, as a consequence, the ability of Korean manufacturing firms to compete in world markets. Moreover, they will provide a desirable foundation for the future research in management accounting.
To conduct the survey, the questionnaire was designed to find out about demographic information about each respondent and about the respondent's company, the level of the company's factory automation and production environment, traditional management accounting practices companies now use, and the application of the modern management accounting approaches, such as ABC, target costing, quality costing and balanced scorecard.
The questionnaire were distributed to 643 management accountants in Korean listed manufacturing companies and 143 usable responses were received.
Many of the respondents in this survey are aware of the management accounting problems, and want to make appropriate changes in their management accounting systems. Non the less, this survey shows that changes in management accounting practices occur slowly in comparison with the rapid changes in manufacturing environment, and Korean manufacturing companies continue to rely on traditional management accounting practices. It also shows that the innovative management accounting techniques except the target costing are introduced to few companies, and usefulness of those techniques is relatively low.