A focus on customer value means that the management accounting system should produce information about both realization and sacrifice. Collecting information about customer sacrifice means gathering information outside the firm. But there are even deeper implications. Successful pursuit of cost leadership and/or differentiation strategies requires an understanding of a firm’s internal and industrial value chains. Effective management of the internal value chain is fundamental to increasing customer value, especially if maximizing customer realization at the lowest possible cost (to the firm) is a goal. The internal value chain is the set of activities required to design, develop, produce, market, and deliver products and services to customers. Thus, emphasizing customer value forces managers to determine which activities in the value chain are important to customers. A management accounting system should track information about a wide variety of activities that span the internal value chain. Consider, for example, the delivery segment. Timely delivery of a product or service is part of the total product and, thus, of value to the customer, Customer value can be increased by increasing the speed of delivery and response, Federal Express exploited this part of the value chain and successfully developed a service that was not being offered by the U.S. Postal Service. Today, many customers believe that a delivery delayed is a delivery denied. This seems to indicate that a good management accounting system ought to develop and measure indicators of customer satisfaction.
The industrial value chain is also critical for strategic cost management. The industrial value chain is the linked set of value-creating activities from basic raw materials to the disposal of the final product by end-use customers. Exhibit 1-3 illustrates a possible value chain for the apple industry. A given firm operation within the industry may not span the entire value chain. The exhibit illustrates that different firms participate in different segments of the chain. Breaking down a firm’s value chain into its strategically important activities is basic to successful implementation of cost leadership and differentiation strategies. Fundamental to a value-chain framework is the recognition of the complex linkages and interrelationships among activities both within and external to the firm. There are two types of linkages: internal and external. Internal linkages are relationships among activities that are performed within a firm’s portion of the industrial value chain (the internal value chin). External linkages are activity relationships between the firm and the firm’s suppliers and customers. Thus, we can talk about supplier linkages and customer linkages, Using these linkages to bring about a win-win outcome for the firm, its suppliers, and its customers is the key to successful strategic cost management, It is also the key feature of what is now called supply chain management. Supply Chain Management is the management of material flows beginning with suppliers and their upstream suppliers, moving to the transformation of materials into finished goods, and finishing with the distribution of finished goods to customers and their downstream customers. Understanding the industrial value chain and going beyond immediate suppliers and customers may reveal hidden benefits. Of course, the firm’s objective is to manage these linkages better than its competitors, thus creating a competitive advantage.
Companies have internal customers as well. For example, the procurement process acquires and delivers parts and materials to producing departments. Providing high-quality parts on a timely basis to managers of producing departments is quality goods to external customers. The emphasis on managing the internal value chain and servicing internal customers reveals the importance of a cross-functional perspective.