原文：
党政机构改革Strategic Cost Management: The
V alue Chain Perspective
One of the major themes in strategic cost management (SCM) concerns the focus of cost management efforts. Stated in question form: How do we organize our thinking about cost management? In the SCM framework, managing costs effectively requires a broad focus, external to the firm. Porter [19851 has called this the "value chain." The "V alue chain" for any firm in any business is the linked t of value-creating activities all the way from basic raw material sources through to the ultimate end-u product delivered into the final consumers' hands. This focus is external to the firm, eing each firm in the context of the overall chain of value-creating activities of which it is very probably only a part. We are aware of no firms which span the entire value chain in which they operate.
A firm such as Chevron in petroleum spans wide gments of the value chain in which it operates, from oil exploration to rvice stations, but it does not span the entire chain. Fifty percent of the crude oil it refines comes from other producers, and more than one third of the oil it refines is sold through other retail outlets. Also, Chevron is not in the auto business at all, the major ur of gasoline. More narrowly,
a firm such as Maxus Energy is only in the oil exploration and production business. The Limited Stores are big "downstream" in retail outlets but own no manufacturing facilities. Reebok Is a famous shoe brand, but the firm owns very few retail outlets. Reebok does, however, own its factories.
Though the value chain concept has been around for more than 10 years, the strategic power of this concept has not been well articulated. Bad on an extensive literature arch, we were not able to find even one complete, empirically derived value chain for a firm. There is a clear need to begin to document real world examples of how the value chain framework provides strategic Insights that are unlikely to emerge from other frameworks. We believe it is important to begin to bring this perspective into the domain of managerial accounting. This paper is an attempt to
麦克阿瑟begin to fill this need.
Strategic power of the value chain analysis-the basics
Whether or not a firm can develop and sustain differentiation and/or cost advantage depends fundamentally on the configuration of its value chain relative to the value chain configuration of each of its competitors. We believe Porter[1985] is correct when he argues that competitive advantage in the marketplace ultimately derives from providing better customer value for equivalent cost or equiva
lent customer value for a lower cost. From this perspective, value chain analysis is esntial to determine exactly where in the firm's gment of the chain—from design to distribution—customer value can be enhanced or costs lowered. As argued by Shank [1989], ignoring linkages upstream from the firm as well as downstream is just too restrictive a perspective.
Danger of Ignoring Value Chain Linkages
The value chain framework is a method for breaking down the chain of activities that runs from basic raw materials to end-u customers into strategically relevant gments In order to understand the behavior of costs and the sources of differentiation. As noted earlier, a firm is typically only a part of the larger t of activities in the value creation and delivery system. Since no two firms of which we are aware, even in the same industry. compete in exactly the same t of markets with exactly the same t of suppliers, the overall value chain for each firm is unique. Suppliers not only produce and deliver Inputs ud in a firm's value activities, but they importantly influence the firm's cost/differentiation position. For example, developments by steel "mini-mills" lowered the operating costs of wire products urs who are the customers of the customers of the mini mill — 2 stages down the value chain. Similarly, customer's actions can have a significant Impact on the firm's value activities. For example, when printing press manufacturers create a new press of "3 meters" width, t
he profitability of paper mills is affected, becau paper machine widths must match some multiple of printing press width. Mill profit is affected by customer actions even though the paper mill is 2 stages upstream from the printer who is a customer of the press manufacturer! As we will discuss more fully below, gaining
and sustaining competitive advantage requires that a firm understand the entire value creation and delivery system, no(just the portion of the value chain In which it participates. Suppliers and customers and suppliers' suppliers and customers' customers have profit margins that are important to identify in understanding a firm's cost/differentiation positioning, since the end-u customers ultimately pay for all the profit margins along the entire value chain.
Value Chain versus Value Added Analysis
The value chain concept can be contrasted with the internal focus that is often adopted in management accounting, as alluded to in the quote at the outt of this paper. Management accounting, as explained In leading textbooks, usually takes a "value-added" perspective, starting with payments to suppliers (purchas), and stopping with charges to customers (sales). The key theme is to maximize the difference—the value-added—between purchas and sales, under the as
sumption that this is the only way a firm can influence profits. We argue that the value chain—not value added—is the more meaningful way to explore strategic issues. V alue added analysis, in which the firm focus only on its own operations in looking for profit enhancement opportunities, can be quite misleading in two ways:The value-added concept starts too late. Starting cost analysis with purchas miss all the opportunities for exploiting linkages with the firm's suppliers. The word "exploit" does not imply that the relationship with the supplier is a zero sum game. Quite the contrary, it implies that the link should be managed so that both the firm and its supplier can benefit. For instance, when bulk chocolate began to be delivered in liquid form in tank cars instead of ten pound molded bars, an industrial chocolate firm (i.e.. the supplier) eliminated the cost of molding bars and packing them and a confectionery producer saved the cost of unpacking and melting [Porter, 1985].
In addition to starting too late, the value-added analysis has another major flaw; it stops too soon. Stopping cost analysis at sales miss all the opportunities for exploiting linkages with the firm's customers. Here again, we contend that the relationship with the customer need not be a zero sum game, but one in which both parties can gain. For instance, some container producers have constructed
manufacturing facilities next to beer breweries and deliver the containers through overhead conveyer比的英语怎么读
s directly onto the customers' asmbly line. This results in significant cost reductions for both the container producers and their customers by expediting the transport of empty containers which are bulky and heavy [Hergert and Morris, 1989].
芸汐传演员表The value chain framework highlights how a firm's products fit into the buyer's value chain. For instance, under the value chain framework, it is readily apparent what percentage the firm's product costs are in the buyer's total costs. The fact that paper constitutes over 40 percent of the total costs of a magazine is significant in encouraging the paper mill and the publisher to work together in cost reduction activities. The San Francisco Chronicle recently adopted JIT for paper delivery to its printing plant, a program only possible with clo supplier cooperation. Since the value-added concept ignores activities after the product leaves the firm, it often does not highlight the degree of buyer power.
Emphasizing the Interdependence of Linked Activities Along a Value Chain V alue chain analysis explicitly recognizes the fact that the individual value activities within a firm are not independent, but rather are interdependent. For instance, at McDonalds, the timing of promotional campaigns (one value activity) significantly influences capacity utilization in "production" (another value activity). The linked activities must be coordinated if the full effect of the promotion is to be realized. As anot
her example, Japane VCR producers were able to reduce retail prices from $1,300 in 1977 to $298 by 1984 by emphasizing the impact of an early step in the chain (product design) on a later step (production) by drastically reducing the number of parts in VCRs [Hergert and Morris, 19891. It is common to hear of conventional approaches to cost reduction which emphasize "across-the-board" cuts. However, by recognizing interlinkages, the value chain analysis highlights the possibility that deliberately increasing costs in one value activity can bring about a reduction in total costs. The expen incurred by P & G to place its order entry computers directly in Walmart stores significantly reduces overall order entry and processing costs for both firms.桓公
Calculational Difficulties
We do not wish to imply that constructing a value chain for a firm is easy. There are veral thorny problems to confront: calculating a value for intermediate products, isolating key cost drivers, identifying linkages across activities, and computing supplier and customer margins.
The analysis starts by gmenting the chain into tho components for which some firm somewhere does make a market, even if other firms do not. This will catch the gments outlined in Exhibit 1 for the paper industry, for example. One could start the process by identifying every point in the chain at
儿童文学论文>我的家乡画一幅画which an external market exists. This gives a good first cut at identifying the value chain gments. One can always find some narrow enough stage such that an external market does not exist. An example would be the progress of a roll of paper from the last press ction of a paper machine to the first dryer ction on the same machine. There is obviously no external market for paper halfway through a continuous flow paper machine! Thus, eing the press ction and the dryer ction of the paper machine as parate stages in the value chain is probably not operational.
Part of the "art" of strategic analysis is deciding which stages in the value chain can meaningfully be decoupled conceptually and which cannot. Unless some firm somewhere has decoupled a stage by making a market at that stage, one cannot independently asss the economic profit earned at that stage. But the opportunities for meaningful analysis across a t of firms that have defined differently what they make versus what they buy and what they ll are often very significant. The fact that this is not always possible does not, in our view, negate the significance when it is possible.
Despite the calculational problems, we contend that every firm should attempt to estimate its value chain. Even the process of performing the value chain analysis, in and by itlf, can be quite instructive. In our experience, we have found this exerci invaluable to managers by forcing them to carefully evaluate how their activities add value to the chain of customers who u their product (r阴道痛是什么原因
vice).
We prent below a ca study from our field rearch (the name of the company
