Towards Increasing the Management Accountant’s Contribution to the Changing Organizational Needs: Analyzing Cost Structures in Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

An opportunity to study the contribution of the management accountant has emerged with companies' adoption of change management techniques. This paper provides a structured way of studying the management accountant’s contribution in Business Process Reengineering (BPR), a widely adopted change management technique. Efficient use of limited resources is critical for the success of any BPR effort and when many BPR interventions and activities have overlapping outcomes, choosing between objectives and alternative means to achieve those objectives is extremely important. The management accountant can provide a methodology of cost accounting that would enable cost comparison among alternatives. The methodology is Activity-Based Costing (ABC) and it assumes that activities consume resources to produce an output. The current study has resulted in the creation of a framework that can be used in studying the underlying cost structures of reengineering.