85263 - Strategic Cost Management

Learning outcomes

The goal of this course is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of cost as a firm’s competitive key success factor and a relevant source for sustainable value creation. Specifically, this course will provide students with the frameworks and techniques for: - comprehend value drivers drivers of business financial performance; analyze firm’s cost; identify business cost drivers; - improve cost performance and to contain and reduce cost inefficiency; - use cost models for design and improve a company business model performance.

Course contents

The course is divided into two modules.

Module 1 will focus business financial analysis and includes the following topics:

- Business model financial performance and value creation

- Profitability ratios and drivers of profitability

- Assets management ratios

- Financial policy ratios for liquidity and assets coverage analysis

- Operating, financial and overall risk assessment ratios

- Benchmarking

Module 2 will focus on strategic cost analysis and will provide the theoretical framework, models and tools for competitive cost management. Specifically, this module covers the following topics:

- Cost management: the framework

-Activity and process cost analysis techniques

-Cost driver analysis

-Cost planning and prevention: life cycle cost, value analysis and target costing techniques

-Cost management for business modelling

Readings/Bibliography

To be announced

Teaching methods

Lectures and case study analysis

Assessment methods

Written test and project work (project work only for class attending students)

18-23: the student has sufficient preparation and analytical skills, spread however, over just few topics taught in the course, the overall jargon is correct

24-27: the student shows and adequate preparation at a technical level with some doubts over the topics. Good, yet not to articulate analytical skills with the use of a correct jargon

28-30: Great knowledge about most of the topics taught in the course, good critical and analytical skills, good usage of the specific jargon

30L: excellent and in depth knowledge of all the topics in the course, excellent critical and analytical skills, excellent usage of specific jargon

Teaching tools

owerpoint class presentations, additional information about the program, cases and problems are available in the e-learning web site (https://virtuale.unibo.it/course/view.php?id=46502)

 

 

Office hours

See the website of Riccardo Silvi

See the website of Filippo Boccali