Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA).

Product- and process design. It is often said that in design (particularly product design) the biggest impact on costs, quality, environmental performance and time can be made. In fact, roughly 80% of total production costs is directly related to the design of a product/service. There are many methods for use in product design and they should be adjusted to the various situations, it is therefore important to understand what needs to be done.
Performance measurement in a wide sense. Performance measurement is the very foundation of modern management and design. As the saying goes; "what gets measured, gets managed". The point is to design a system of simple, yet relevant, measures that give decision makers relevant feedback w.r.t. objectives, goals and strategies. The Balanced Scorecard is an important method in this context as is economic profit.
Modern cost management has reached far both on strategic and tactical level with approaches such as Activity-Based Costing (ABC) and Target Costing. Target Costing apply mostly on strategic level, while ABC applies both on strategic and tactical level. Of these methods ABC is the best known concept and that is not without reason. ABC has in many ways revolutionized cost management and can probably rightfully be called the greatest management innovation in the 20th century.
Environmental management. Here, my Ph.D. work has contributed substantially according to Ray C. Anderson - the Co-Chairman of President Clinton's Council on Sustainable Development - with a new environmental impact indicator (the Waste Index) in addition to an integrated environmental- and cost management method called Activity-Based Cost and Environmental Management. This method is in many ways an extension and further development of Activity-Based Management, and it is the only method so far that can perform integrated environmental- and cost assessments (Life-Cycle Costing (LCC) and Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA)) according to modern management principles. When Activity-Based Cost and Environmental Management models incorporate life-cycle perspectives they are usually referred to as Activity-Based Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) models and when they focus on costs alone I refer to it as Activity-Based Life-Cycle Costing.
Business analysis, forecasting, uncertainty analysis and Critical Assumption Planning (CAP). In Activity-Based Cost and Environmental Management forecasting/simulation along with uncertainty analysis is incorporated and can be employed in any situation ranging from simple business- and investment analyses to complex LCAs. Essentially, it is a systematic approach towards turning hindsight into useful foresight. Everybody jokes about the hindsight of cost accounting and many other management tools - why not use to power of activity-based frameworks and Monte Carlo methods and do something about it?
Risk management and Strategy are areas that I have worked significantly with because they are so close to most of the other areas mentioned above. Here, I apply various Strategic Risk Management concepts as well as ABC and other approaches

Copyright ฉ 2000 Jan EmblemsvagLast modified: March 29, 2006