May 2020 Q2 a(i)
Given the dynamic environment within which organisations operate, the Management Accountant’s role has evolved to include providing information that would assist the firm to design strategies geared towards achieving competitive advantage through sustained customer satisfaction. These strategies target key success factors which include cost efficiency, quality, time and innovation because of the value placed on them by customers.
Required:
i) Discuss FOUR (4) management concepts that the Management Accountant can use to achieve customer satisfaction. (8 marks)
View Solution
Total Quality Management (TQM): Is a term used to describe a situation where all business functions are involved in a process of continuous quality improvement that focuses on delivering products or services of consistently high quality in a timely fashion. Through TQM, organizations seek to increase customer satisfaction not only by emphasizing quality products and services but also providing speedier response to customer request.
Benchmarking: Is a technique that is increasingly being adopted as a mechanism for achieving continuous improvement. It is a continuous process of measuring a firm’s products, services or activities against the other best-performing organizations, either internal or external to the firm. It enables organizations to achieve high competitive standards desired by customers.
Employee Empowerment: It relates to providing employees with relevant information to enable them to make continuous improvements to the output of processes. This would enable employees to respond faster to customers, increase price flexibility, reduce cycle time and improve morale.
Value chain Analysis: It is the linked set of value-creating activities all the way from basic raw material sources for component suppliers though to the ultimate end-use product or service delivered to the customer. The value is created through research and development, design, production, marketing, distribution and customer service Co-ordinating the individual parts of the value chain together to work as a team creates the conditions to improve customer satisfaction.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Ethics and Environmental Issues
(Any 4 well explained points @ 2 marks each = 8 marks)