ADVANCED MANAGEMENT CONTROLS GSM 645

3 units, Tuesday and Thursday 3:50 p.m. to 5:10 p.m., Rm.301

Instructor: Fred Thompson, Rm. 401, x6228, H (503) 508-4229

Office hours: Wednesday 9 am to 1 pm, Mudd 401, or by appointment

e-mail FTHOMPSO@WILLAMETTE.EDU

 

Suggested prerequisites: Core

Objectives: This course is a capstone course. It seeks to integrate and give practical meaning to the materials presented in the core -- managing exchange and managing organizations, finance, economics, budget and control, information technology, and quantitative methods -- using a variety of cases. Cases are drawn from the public and not-for-profit sectors as well as business.

The course takes a functional and a process approach to management integration. The functional perspective reflects the POSDCORB [strategic planning, organizational design, staffing, organizational development, controlling, operating, reporting, budgeting] framework. This course focuses on lower level management functions: controlling, operating, reporting, and budgeting. But it also shows how the higher-level management functions: planning, organizing, staffing, developing, directly influence the power and productivity of lower level functions. The process approach reflects the premise that management is primarily about the creating value through the development and conservation of cooperative, learning relationships -- upward and outward with customers, sponsors, and investors, throughout the organization, and back through the entity's entire supply chain.

Value-creation -- satisfaction of an entity's customers by means of service delivery, acquisition, consumption, and ultimately disposal -- is the main purpose of an organization and cooperation -- building mutually beneficial relationships between the members of an organization and its community of stakeholders -- are the main means of accomplishing this end. Profits and pecuniary rewards are by-products of organizational action rather than ultimate ends; although the power of markets, especially financial markets, to discipline slack organizations must be appreciated.

Nowadays, it makes sense to think of most organizations as bundles of projects or even small businesses. Our disciplinary stovepipes -- strategy and policy, marketing, organization theory and behavior, human resources, finance, accounting, managerial economics and operations research, quantitative methods and statistics, and information technology and computer science -- have always been dysfunctional insofar as they had more to do with faculty preparation than student needs. They are also increasingly irrelevant. Emerging organizations are no longer compartmentalized the way business schools once were and most still are. What we will see in the 21st century are smaller, flatter organizations, organized around a set of generic, value-creating processes and specific competencies. The control systems of these organizations, like those of centralized bureaucracies, will collect lots of information on every aspect of operations, including non-financial information, but unlike the control systems of stovepipe organizations, which were erected on the premise that the exercise of judgment should be passed up the managerial ranks, information in forward-looking organizations will be used to push the exercise of judgment down to wherever it is most needed. Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster refer to these new kinds of organizational arrangements as hyperarchies, after the hyperlinks of the World Wide Web. They assert that, like the Internet itself, these kinds of organizations have eliminated the need to channel information. This, they claim, challenges all hierarchies, whether of logic or of power, "with the possibility (or the threat) of random access and information symmetry."

Students who wish to learn more about management integration, especially integrating the higher level management functions are encouraged to take GSM 650 and/or GSM 634. Those who wish to know more about project budgeting and planning should take GSM 608 or GSM 603; responsibility accounting, GSM 610; and public policy formulation and implementation, GSM 601.

COURSE OUTLINE

This course is about coordination, performance measurement, and control systems for implementing strategy in the context of both project oriented entities and cyclical ones. It is divided into four sections. The first section starts with the nature of organizational strategy and the formulation or identification of a mission or product-market strategy and to aligning the organization's product-market strategy with its administrative structure and its administrative structure with its responsibility and account (or control) structures.

The second section of the course is concerned with staffing, developing, and rewarding personnel.

The third section is concerned with budgeting, target setting, and performance measurement. Attention is given to the design of various kinds of responsibility structures. 1. Cyclical: revenue and expense centers, profit centers, and investment centers, and 2. Finite: projects, products, and teams. This section also deals with the distinction between mission and support centers, with programming and project analysis -- i.e., transforming project budgets (capital budgets) into responsibility budgets, with using transfer prices to link responsibility centers, and with the special problems that arise in the case of discretionary expense centers.

The last section of the course is concerned with business process management. It raises issues having to do with inventory management (JIT and EOQ models), overhead management (cycle-time burdening and activity accounting), pricing (unbalanced transfer prices, multi-part tariffs, and intraorganizational sales of assets), and process reengineering, as well as the more traditional search, bargaining, and monitoring problems that arise in the context of budgeting and standard setting.

GRADING

Grading will be based upon case presentations (20%) class participation (40%), case and memos (40%). Case presentations, class discussion, and memos should reflect material contained in readings.

Two case presentations are required. A 2 or 3 person team will present each case. Team members will act out the case in detail so as to highlight the main issues and lessons illustrated by the case. Your presentation will be evaluated in terms of your mastery of the case and also by your ability to stimulate class participation and debate. Each group of presenters will meet with me at least twice before presenting their case and once after. You are responsible for scheduling these meetings. Failure to do so will adversely affect your grades. Cases will be assigned largely on a first-come, first-served basis. Please select your cases for presentation ASAP using ClassTools, GSM-645: Data Drop.

Participation will be evaluated each class session in terms of your understanding and mastery of the material, clarity and brevity, persuasiveness, and ability to listen to and respond productively to your colleagues.

Four one page, single-spaced (10 or 11 pitch) memos are required. Your memos should address only ONE question raised by the case. Avoid the obvious and the trivial. Memos are due at the beginning of the class in which the case is discussed. Case writing can be substituted for case memos. ONLY one case memo can be written from each group/section of cases. Please do NOT write a case memo for a case that you are presenting. Please discuss the cases outside of class, but do your own writing and thinking.

Your written materials will be evaluated in terms of clarity, logic, and English usage, as well as content (with some leeway given to non-native English speakers).

Written assignment should be submitted via ClassTools as Word documents. Open GSM-645: Hand Ins; upload assignment to appropriate folder using no spaces in the document title. For example, if you were turning in a memo on The Real Paper, you would upload it to Section_1/_ as RealPaper.doc. ClassTools will automatically recognize the sender and log the date and time of submission.

ASSIGNMENTS

January 20. Please read Introduction.

January 22. Read about the case method.

Section 1 STRATEGY AND STRUCTURE

January 27. Do The Real Paper (HO). How should TRP be governed? How does TRP create value? What is its product-market strategy? Given its competitive strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats, what should its product market strategy be? How can it get from where it is to where it should be? Presenters: Jessica Brown and George Schmidt.

January 29. Do Stewart Box Company (HO). How does SBC create value? What is wrong with SBC? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Show evidence of one serious weakness, what would you do to fix it? Presenters: Lisa Gislason and David Holmes.

February 3. Read Learning Module on the "New" Organization (HO); also read Fordism and PostFordism. Do Texas Instruments and Hewlett Packard (HO). How do HP & TI create value? What is the difference between HP & TI's product-market strategies? What must each do to be successful? Are they well organized to achieve success? Show evidence of one serious weakness at either HP or TI, what would you do to fix it? Presenters: Joyce Fred and Bea Tijerina.

February 5. Read about Strategy and Structure.

February 10. Do The United States Post Office [HO]. What is USPO's product-market strategy (at time case takes place)? Is USPO a multi-product company or a single product company? Is its structure aligned with its strategy? How would you measure value creation at USPO? How about its operating units? Presenters Amy Crocker and Darnell Price.

February 12. Do ABB (HO). How does ABB create value? What is different about the way it creates value and the way HP or USPO creates value? Does its organization reflect these differences? Show evidence of one serious weakness at ABB, what would you do to fix it? Your case memo from this section/group of cases must be complete by the beginning of this class session. Presenters: Elvira Mamedzade and Van Phan.

Section 2 STAFFING, DEVELOPING, REWARDING

February 17. Read Why a New Public Management? Why Now?

February 19. Do Lincoln Electric A [HO]. How does Lincoln Electric create value? What are the sources of its competitive advantage? How do its HR policies contribute to it success. Would these policies work equally well at TI? HP? The USPO? Presenters: Kensuke Ono and Yasuyuki Kaji.

February 24. Do Lincoln Electric B [HO] Can LE export its policies successfully?

February 26. Do Nucor A [HO]. How does Nucor create value? What are the sources of its competitive advantage? How do its HR policies contribute to it success. Would these policies work equally well at TI? HP? The USPO? Your case memo from this section/group of cases must be complete by the beginning of this class session. Presenters: Lisa Gislason and David Holmes.

Section 3 BUDGETING, TARGET SETTING, PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

March 2. Read Matching Responsibilities with Tactics.

March 5. Read Responsibility Budgeting; also do Sound Dynamics (HO). What should SD's controller do now? What mistakes were made? Who made them? Contrast SD with Nucor, LE, TI, or USPO? Presenters: Bea Tijirina & Amy Crocker.

March 9. Guest Speaker, T.J. Chandler, Chandler Analytics --- leadership and leadership styles.

March 11. Read Investment Centers.

March 16. Do Cheetah Division (HO), see Inventory Management. Presenters: Elvira Mamedzade and Van Phan,

March 18. Do Birch Paper (HO). Presenters: Jeff Hern and George Schmidt.

March 30. Do Emerson Electric Company (HO). How does EE create value? Is its organizational structure consistent with its strategy? Who is responsible for what? Is EE's marketplace sustainable? Does it have a distinctive competence?

April 1. Do Codman and Shutleff, Inc [HO]. What kind of a control system does J&J use? How does it work? How good is J&J at creating value? How come? What would you do if C&S were your responsibility?

April 6. Do Responsibility Budgeting at the AFMC.

April 8. Do Analog Devices [HO]. How should AD measure performance? Why isn't AD more successful in the marketplace? What needs to be fixed? How would you fix it? Why? PARTY AFTER CLASS, 3270 Holiday Drive S. Your case memo from this section/group of cases must be complete by the beginning of this class session. Presenters: Joyce Fred and Darnell Price.

Section 4 PROCESS MANAGEMENT

April 13. Read Cost Accounting

April 15. Read about the OODA Cycle.

April 20. Do New York City Sanitation Department [HO]. How does CRG create value? How would you measure value creation at CRG? Compare CRG with Nucor and LE. What can CRG do to create more value? What would you do? Presenters: Kensuke Ono and Yasuyuki Kaji.

April 21. Read about Process Reengineering. Do Iron River Paper Mill [HO]. What is wrong IRPM's process? How would you fix things to create more value? Why isn't IRPM doing those things? How would you fix IRPM's management team? Presenters: Jessica Brown and Jeff Hern.

April 27. Do Tektronix A [HO].

April 29. Do Tektronix B & C [HO]. Your case memo from this section/group of cases must be complete by the beginning of this class session.

May 4. Read about the digital corporation.

Monterery IPMN Workshop summary

 

TOPICAL OUTLINE OF THIS COURSE
A. Behavior in Organizations
1. Strategic planning, management and task control, relation to management accounting
2. The management control process: programming, budgeting, execution, and evaluation
3. Organizational goals
a. customer satisfaction and profitability
b. maximizing shareholder value
c. risk control
d. importance of other stakeholders
4. Goal congruence and motivation
a. personal needs (the expectancy theory framework)
b. incentives and rules
c. organizational culture and management behavior
d. informal organization
e. perception and communication
f. cooperation and conflict
5. Types of organizations
a. functional
b. program/project/business unit
c. matrix, network, virtual proximity
B. Strategy
1. Key questions (depends on organizational level)
2. Product-market strategy (single mission, related missions, unrelated missions)
3. Mission portfolio evaluation (build, hold, harvest, divest?)
4. Competitive strategy (low price/cost; high-value, rapid product development)
a. intensity of competitive rivalry
b. bargaining power of buyers
c. bargaining power of suppliers
d. threat from substitutes
e. threat from new entry
5. For effective execution different product-market strategies require different task priorities, different key success factors, skills, perspectives, and behaviors
6. A continuing concern in the design of a control system should be whether the behavior induced by the control system is consistent with the strategy
7. Alignment
C. Responsibility Centers and the Principal-Agent Problem
1. Nature of responsibility centers (decentralization of responsibility and authority)
a. mission center
b. support center
2. Expense centers
a. discretionary expense centers and object of expenditure budgets (note that all capital/project budgets are at the outset object of expenditure budgets)
b. engineered expense centers
(1) performance budgets
(2) standard costs and quasi-profitability
3. Profit centers
a. measuring profitability
(1) contribution margin, 
(2) direct business unit profit, 
(3) controllable business unit profit, 
(4) income before taxes, 
(5) net income
b. common revenues and expenses
4. Investment centers
a. measurement of assets employed
(1) working capital, 
(2) property, plant, equipment, 
(3) other
b. ERA (residual income) vs. ROI
5. Transfer pricing
a. balanced prices
(1) market or opportunity cost, 
(2) fully-distributed average cost, 
(3) average variable cost or direct cost, 
(4) marginal cost, 
(5) negotiated or bargained, (6) other
b. unbalanced and multipart tariffs
c. arbitration, public-utility type regulation, reassignment of assets
D. Capital Budgeting and Programming
1. Capital investment analysis, ex ante
2. Ongoing projects/programs/products (value chain vs. breakeven analysis)
3. Activity-based costing, JIT & EOQ, cycle-time analysis, TQM, CAD-CAM
4. Preparing and using a project budget after the go ahead
a. scope, use of should-cost models
b. schedule (events, milestones, timelines)
c. cost (resources used, outlays) estimating and measurement
      d. PERT, CPM
      e. cost to complete
5. Types of contracts
a. fixed price
b. variable price
E. Incentives
1. Financial rewards
2. Psychological and social rewards
3. Design considerations
a. size of bonus relative to salary
b. bonus based on
c. performance criteria
d. time period
e. weights given nonfinancial criteria
f. benchmarks
g. degree of subjectivity
h. form of bonus payment
4. High-powered vs. low-powered incentives 
5. Monitoring vs. incentive contracting