期间费用成本控制 相关 外文文献The right way to control period e.doc

The Right Way to Control Period Expense Management Accounting; Sep 1990; 72, 3; ABI/INFORM Complete pg. 55-59 BY DONALD A. J. BYRUM Year in and year out, the greatest challenge facing industry is cost control. No manager in his right mind would try to control direct material costs by stopping the purchase of direct material. Such an action obviously soon would bring production to a stop, i which would bring sales to a stop, which would bring the business to an end. Managers are smarter than that. They will have their engineering staff design out the most costly components and then have their purchasing staff find the least costly suppliers for the remaining components. In the same way, no manager in his right mind would try to control direct labor costs by firing his direct workers. The result would be exactly the same as not buying direct material. Instead, design engineers would be asked to simplify the construction specifications, and manufacturing engineers would be asked to provide tools and equipment that would maximize worker efficiency. In both these instances management recognizes, perhaps only subconsciously, that the cost is a symptom, not a disease, and that it is the disease that must be attacked. To continue the medical metaphor, the disease is like an active cancer that will grow continuously unless it is attacked continuously. But consider how management has handled salaried expense, where the normal method of cost control is decimation, that is, elimination of a percentage of the head count in expectation of a equal percentage reduction of salaried expense. It never happens. In fact, such actions have been known to result in an increase in total period cost expense. The question is, What is the most effective way of controlling period costs? The answer is through exactly the same techniques as are used for direct material and direct labor, that is, changing the design specifications of the job description to eliminate inefficient, redundant, and un