Exam 1: The Changing Business Environment - a Managers Perspective

Assume your club makes and sells boxes of chocolate every year as a fundraising project for Valentine's Day. As the current director of projects, you are interested in improving the quality of the service and the product your club offers. You have just learned about continuous improvement. Discuss how your club could use JIT, TQM, and ABM to achieve improved quality. Note: Student answers will vary considerably depending on their approach. However, each answer should indicate that the student has a grasp of what JIT, TQM, and ABM mean and how each would impact an organization's attempt to achieve continuous improvement. A sample answer is given below.

In comparing management accounting with financial accounting, which of the following statements is true?

Carlson Manufacturing is a producer of plastic bottles for bottled water companies. In July of this year, the plant manager switched to a new supplier of raw materials. The materials have a lower cost, and because of their chemical composition, more bottles can be made per hour. The downside of this faster production is that more bad, unusable bottles result. Below are the production data for the two months before and after the switch of suppliers. a. Compute bad units as a percentage of total production for each month. Round answers to two decimal places. b. What does the plant manager need to consider in determining whether or not to continue buying raw material from the new supplier?

If a management accountant confides to a relative that his or her company has a confidential plan to merge with another company in the near future, the accountant has

Total quality management has many of the same characteristics as the JIT philosophy.

Management accounting activities

Mi Casa is a housekeeping company in Brownsville, Texas. The corporation is owned 100 percent by Jean Kline. Jean plans to develop the company into a multimillion-dollar company as the demand for housekeeping services in Brownsville is increasing at a rapid pace as the community grows. Currently, Jean has three housekeepers who each work a 40-hour week. Over the past four weeks, the actual hours worked were as follows: Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Total Housekeepers 136 140 145 145 566 Jean is concerned with the hours worked. Analyze the activity for the four weeks by preparing a table showing the estimated hours, actual hours, and the hours under (or over) estimate. Based on the information in your table, does Jean have reason for concern? If so, what could some of the possible reasons be for the hours spent?

Most management decisions are based on analyses using expected future dollars.

The costs of quality consist entirely of rework costs and customer complaint costs.

Which of the following is a characteristic of management accounting?

Rules applicable to accounting information created and prepared for management use are the same as those for information reported to the general public.

A manager should write the purpose of a report before preparing it.

Management accounting complements each stage in the management process.

Although some management accountants strive to update their knowledge and skills, such updating is not within the realm of management accountants' ethical standards.

Although the purpose of the confidentiality standard is to encourage management accountants to remain loyal to their company, failure to disclose knowledge of internal illegal acts to outside authorities can result in the accountants being charged as an accessory to the crime.

What steps would a company using TQM take to improve product or service quality?

The balanced scorecard has gained little acceptance as an approach to establish effective performance measurement.

An advantage of value chain analysis is that it allows a company to focus on what a company does best.

The keys to successful report writing include identifying the who, what, when, and why of the report.

The management process includes all of the following stages except