Application of Management Accounting Techniques in Manufacturing Firms in Bangladesh

Abstract

Management accounting in recent years has changed significantly due to the change in production technology, bitter competition, involvement of consumers, and increased professionalism in managing business. Billions of dollars are now invested in manufacturing process whereas life cycle of modern technology becomes shorter. This dilemma exerts a big challenge on the scope of management accounting. In response, advanced techniques in the field of management accounting have been evolved in last couple of years. However, researchers in management accounting will give contradictory opinion regarding the application of advanced management accounting techniques (AMAT) in modern manufacturing environment (MME). Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987) brings criticism on the relevance of management accounting information which is produced too late, too aggregated, and too distorted to be relevant for managers’ planning and controlling decisions. Manufacturing process is refined regularly whereas management accounting lags behind in addressing the revised needs. However, it’s very difficult to define AMAT and MME objectively as they depend on a lot of contextual variables. Again, establishing a crude relationship between AMAT and MME is not so easy. Amid such difficulty and differences in opinion, it is heartening for the management accounting researchers that a couple of techniques have already been developed and used in the field of management accounting giving sufficient support to MME. Exploring the relationship between AMAT and MME is an important area of study in Bangladesh as Bangladesh has become a destination of large industrial investments, even by international investors. Asian countries are lagging behind in terms of advanced manufacturing process as compared with advanced economy. Therefore, AMAT has already been developed strongly to cater to the specific need of management in these countries. This study basically intends to focus light on the management accounting techniques developed so far in response to modern production technology and their application from the perspective of Bangladesh. It also intends to highlight the specific benefits that management may capitalize from the use of such management accounting techniques. It will open up new avenues to carry out further researches in line with the specific objectives of different management accounting techniques. To fulfill the prime objective, a semi-structured questionnaire has been constructed and administered covering sampled manufacturing firms in Bangladesh to find out the possible bearing of management accounting techniques on productivity, competitive advantage and strategic positioning. The outcome of the study shows that the firms operating in Bangladesh still utilizes traditional techniques widely and the relationship among the chosen variables are not strong. It develops a weak profile of management accounting tools applied in Bangladesh. However, the result should be interpreted keeping the time frame and profile of the responding companies into consideration.