The case company is called the Stam Groep; a familyowned
group of companies that provide services in the
automotive sector. The Stam Groep employs approximately
360 people, and owns ten Renault dealerships in
the Netherlands. Furthermore, it has two body shops, four
petrol stations, a leasing company and a finance and insurance
company. Starting in 2001, the company’s senior
management introduced new accounting information; the
details of which will be provided later. Interestingly, the
dealerships differed considerably in the extent to which
they use the new accounting information.
The company was founded in 1913 and is now owned
and managed by the fourth generation of the Stam family.
Since 1999, the Stam Groep has undergone drastic changes.
First, in 1999 it acquired four new dealerships. These new
dealerships, which were previously owned by a single individual,
Evert Kroon, differed considerably from the original
dealerships in the Stam Groep. The most important difference
was that each of the original Stam dealerships was
managed by a member of the Stam family, whereas Evert
Kroon employed (non-family) dealership managers and
interfered little in the daily managerial tasks. Second, as a
result of these acquisitions and the increased market share
of Renault in the Dutch market, the Stam Groep expanded
considerably. Third, the previous (third) generation of the
Stam family gradually retired and the fourth generation
took over the ownership and management of the company.
Importantly, the third and the fourth generations differed
considerably. The third generation was trained and educated
in practice and had considerable experience of the
operational work of the dealerships; consequently, they
interfered intensively in the daily operations of the dealerships.
The fourth, university-trained, generation concluded
that the increased complexity and size of the company
meant that they could no longer be directly involved in
the daily operations and that they should leave much of
the operational decision-making to non-family managers.
Starting in 2001, the company’s management control system
has changed; the five most important changes are
summarized in Fig. 2.
The first change concerned the formation of the central
senior management team for the Stam Groep as a whole.
Until then, the dealership managers were family-members
who, largely independently of the other dealerships, made
their own decisions concerning both strategic issues (such
as policy concerning personnel, organization, investments,
marketing and advertising) and operational issues (such as
price-setting and order acceptance). In the new structure,
the family-members make up the group’s central senior
management team; while the dealerships have non-family
managers. Second, decisions concerning strategy and targets
were centralized, being moved from the dealerships to
the central management, but operational decision-making
remained in the dealerships.
Third, the structure of the dealerships was standardized.
Each dealership now has a dealership manager and
four department managers: a service manager, aworkshop
manager, a parts manager and a sales manager. The service
manager is in charge of the reception and the planning of
the workshop. Furthermore, the service manager coordinates
the activities of the departments in the dealership;
he ensures that the workshop prepares the cars sold by
the sales department and he informs the parts department
about parts that the workshop needs. The workshop manager
is in charge of the mechanics; he checks the quality of
their work, whether all the necessary jobs are completed
and he trains them in doing their work. The parts manager
is responsible for the on-time provision of the parts needed
in the workshop, the purchasing of the parts, selling parts
to external customers and stock-keeping. Finally, the sales
manager is responsible for selling both new and used cars.
Fourth, the existing, rather implicit, approach to
management control was replaced by amore explicit management
control system. Before the change, there were
no protocols for operational processes; control of these
processes was exercised informally by the dealership managers.
After the change, written protocols were produced,
and were the same for all the dealerships. Examples are
protocols for purchasing parts, making offers1 and order