N90387 Business Process Management and Control

The course is focused on the Managerial Accounting knowledge and tools: Master budget, Variance analysis, Activity based Budgeting, Performance Measurement, Responsibility acconting are the basic topics of the course. Moreover, after the course students will be able to deal with many of the most common business decisions (marketing and production), selecting a course of action among several alternative scenarios. They will be also able to deal with businesses process management and BPR.

The course is open to Erasmus students as well as to Italian students, these ones with limitations according to the number of Erasmus students.

The course is designed to equip students with the knowledge and tools of business management for handling decision-making problems, taking into account economic variables. Prices and costs will be analyzed in order to take marketing and production decisions. Students will be also able to elaborate Master budget documents, to evaluate performance by means of variance analysis, to report results by using different models of statements (full costing and variable costing). 

The programme of the course is the following:

• Business process identification: we analyze corporate processes, understanding why it is important and how to recognize them (traditional functional approach vs. activity based approach)

• Business process decisions: using break even point and relations between costs, volumes, profit we learn how to take decisions in marketing and production processes (how to deal with a special order or deletion or addition of products, services or departments, etc.). Exercises and real cases (Pizza Hut, Blockbuster, etc.) follow every theoretical explanation:

• Budget for manufacturing company: a comprehensive case (case Beirut Freeze)

• Budget for manufacturing without and  with limiting factors (Iron part 1 and 2)

• Variance analysis_ theory and exercises _ costs

• Variance analysis_ theory and exercises_revenues

• Activity based costing and budgeting

• Responsibility accounting and reporting (full costing and variable costing)

• Non financial measures of performance; balanced scorecard

• Profit center more in detail: financial measures and transfer prices

The course is balanced between tradional class lessons and home assignments.

Moreover, group and individual works as well as class presentations are required.

The final grade of the course is the result of:

• class participation (20%)
• home assignments (30%)
• final written test (50%)