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有“金边债券”之称的是（）。
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通过比较供应商的力量和顾客的力量，讨论迈克尔·波特的五力模型。
Albacore Chess Stores (Albacore) is a chain of 12 shops specialising in selling items associated with the game of chess: boards, pieces, clocks, software and books. Three years ago, the company was the subject of a venture capital buyout from a larger group. A new senior management team was put in place after the buyout. They have the aim of running the business in order to maximise profits.
The Chief Financial Officer (CFO), along with the other members of senior management, sets the annual budget and uses a standard costing approach with variance analysis in order to control individual shop performance. The head office handles all capital purchases and brand marketing. All inventory purchasing is done centrally and the shop opening times are set as standard across the company. As an illustration of senior management attitude, the CFO had set the budget for 2011 staff costs at $7 per hour for part-time staff and this was rigorously observed in the period.
Each shop is run by a manager who reports their financial results to head office. The shop managers recruit and manage the staffing of their shop. They have some autonomy in setting prices locally and have been given authority to vary prices by up to 10% from a master list produced by the CFO. They also have a local marketing budget agreed each year by the shop’s manager and the marketing director as part of the annual appraisal process.
The shop managers have approached the Chairman of Albacore to complain about the way that they are managed and their remuneration. They feel that their efforts are unrecognised by senior management. One manager commented, ‘I have had a successful year in hard economic circumstances. I have run a number of promotions in the shop that have been well received by the customers. However, the budgets that are set are impossible to achieve and as a result I have not been paid any bonus although I feel that I have done everything in my power to bring in good profits.’
The shop managers at Albacore are paid a basic salary of $27,000 with bonuses of up to 30% of basic salary dependent on two factors: performance above budget and the operational director’s performance assessment. The budget for the next year is prepared by the CFO and presented at the shop manager’s annual appraisal.
The Chairman has come to you to ask if you can consider the system of performance assessment for the shop managers and give an independent perspective on the reward systems at Albacore. She has provided the following illustrative information from the previous year for one shop:
Albacore Chess Stores
Tunny Branch Year to Sept 2011
Notes:
Property costs includes heating, lighting and rental.
Positive variances are favourable.
The manager of this shop commented at the appraisal meeting that she felt that the assessment was unfair since her failure to make budget was due to general economic conditions. The industry as a whole saw a 12% fall in revenues during the period and the budget for the period was set to be the same as the previous period. She was not paid a bonus for the period.
Required:
(a) Assess the suitability of the branch information given as a means of assessing the shop manager’s performance for this store, providing suitable additional calculations. (8 marks)
(b) Analyse the performance management style. and evaluate the performance appraisal system at Albacore. Suggest suitable improvements to its reward system for the shop managers. (12 marks)
Tench Cars (Tench) is large national car manufacturing business. It is based in Essland, a country that has recently turned from state communism to democratic capitalism. The car industry had been heavily supported and controlled by the bureaucracy of the old regime. The government had stipulated production and employment targets for the business but had ignored profit as a performance measure. Tench is now run by a new generation of capitalist business people intent on rejuvenating the company’s fortunes.
The company has a strong position within Essland, which has a population of 200 million and forms the majority of Tench’s market. However, the company has also traditionally achieved a good market share in six neighbouring countries due to historic links and shared culture between them and Essland. All of these markets are experiencing growing car ownership as political and market reforms lead to greater wealth in a large proportion of the population. Additionally, the new government in Essland is deregulating markets and opening the country to imports of foreign vehicles.
Tench’s management recognises that it needs to make fundamental changes to its production approach in order to combat increased competition from foreign manufacturers. Tench’s cars are now being seen as ugly, pollutive and with poor safety features in comparison to the foreign competition. Management plans to address this by improving the quality of its cars through the use of quality management techniques. It plans to improve financial performance through the use of Kaizen costing and just-in-time purchasing and production. Tench’s existing performance reporting system uses standard costing and budgetary variance analysis in order to monitor and control production activities.
The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Tench has commented that he is confused by the terminology associated with quality management and needs a clearer understanding of the different costs associated with quality management. The CFO also wants to know the impact of including quality costs and using the Kaizen costing approach on the traditional standard costing approach at Tench.
Required:
Write to the CFO to:
(a) Discuss the impact of collection and use of quality costs on the current costing systems at Tench. (6 marks)
(b) Discuss and evaluate the impact of the Kaizen costing approach on the costing systems and employee management at Tench. (8 marks)
(c) Briefly evaluate the effect of moving to just-in-time purchasing and production, noting the impact on performance measures at Tench. (6 marks)
Section B – TWO questions ONLY to be attempted
Bluefin School (Bluefin) is a school for 12 to 17-year-old pupils. It currently has 1,000 pupils attending drawn from its local area. The school is run by an executive group comprising the head of school and two deputy head teachers. This group reports to a board of governors who are part-time and selected from the local community and parents. The school is wholly funded by the government.
The school’s ethos is ‘to promote learning, citizenship and self-confidence among the pupils. This is developed from a consensus, led by the board of governors and the head of school and informed by the views of the pupils’ parents.’
The school information systems are highly decentralised. Each department keeps its own records on a stand-alone PC using basic word processing and spreadsheet packages. The school’s administrative department has a small network in its own offices with compatible applications and also a database and financial recording and reporting package for use in schools (provided by the government).
The school is broken down into 11 academic departments such as mathematics, science and history. Each department head must prepare information for reporting to the board by inputting and processing the data. They obtain some help from an administrator who visits each department to spend a few hours per week helping in the recording and preparation of the departmental information. The department heads have different approaches to reporting their performance, with some using average marks in the annual exams for each class and some using pass rates of the annual exams. Some department heads present graphs of their data while most use tables of figures.
The information is passed from each department to the school administration office on a memory stick (USB flash drive). The school administration office prints out the information for each department and adds it to a financial report creating a governors’ pack of usually about 13 pages for the annual review board meeting. The financial report is a detailed income and expenditure statement for the period under review (usually a two page print-out from the reporting package). An example of one of the 11 departments’ report is given in the Appendix.
The board of governors meets every quarter and reviews the governors’ pack once a year. The board are concerned that the information that they are receiving is not meeting their needs and that there are a number of problems with the control and security of some of the data.
It has been suggested that the school should consider improving its information systems by installing a network across the school to link the departmental computers and the administration department. A single database would be created to store all the performance information. The computers would then be linked to the internet in order to facilitate data transfer to other schools in the region and to the government.
Appendix
Bluefin School
Mathematics department
Notes:
Each year contains pupils of the same age.
Annual national exams are set in years 4, 5 and 6.
Each year group is divided into different classes in order to ensure that classes do not exceed 35 pupils.
(Not all pupils take every subject each year.)
Average marks are for the annual examinations.
Required:
(a) With reference to the current situation at Bluefin School, discuss the controls and security procedures that are necessary for management information. (9 marks)
(b) Using the limited information available, evaluate the usefulness of the pack that is provided to the board of governors. (6 marks)
(c) Evaluate the improvements suggested to the information systems at Bluefin. (5 marks)
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