On the availability of “relevant costs” information in operations management

Abstract

The operations management (OM) function is, amongst others, held responsible for in-time delivery of customer orders against minimal costs. From a management accounting point of view, all decisions which are made to fulfil this function can be evaluated against relevant costs. This would imply that for each decision, management must take into consideration all possible variable costs and opportunity costs. At the operational level, variable costs consist of capacity costs such as work in overtime and inventory carrying costs. Opportunity costs (may) arise if promised delivery dates cannot be met. In practice, this OM-function is often (partially) performed by materials management, production management and/or physical distribution management. Moreover, in an engineer-to-order production situation, engineering management and related areas, (e.g. process planning) are also involved. In each stage of production, physical or non-physical, decisions concerning (internal) delivery dates, utilization of capacity and inventory may occur. Research was carried out to find out whether management is actually provided with relevant costs information to evaluate these (operational) decisions. Therefore, case study research in eight Dutch industrial firms was carried out. It concerned small to medium sized firms (80–250 employees) firms, all producing (rather complex) machines for industrial markets. Production control situations varied between assemble-to-order and engineer-to-order. The case studies were carried out in a highly structured manner. It occurred that all kinds of relevant costs information was missing or not known to the management in charge. Missing information concerned internal and external delivery performance, actual inventory and WIP levels, and actual utilization of capacity. Furthermore, it arose that all kinds of standards were unreliable. From a management accounting perspective, the results of the case study research indicate that relevant costs decision making is al least not very common in practice. If relevant costs are partially missing, managers will decide using other (irrelevant?) information. We feel that this might perhaps be an explanation for the growing discontent that the management accounting is confronted with.