The design of management accounting system has to take into consideration the decision needs of the managers. Also it has to take into consideration the new themes and challenges that managers face currently.
Horngren identified four such themes in the tenth edition of his book.
1. Customer focus: The challenge for managers it invest sufficient resources to enhance customer satisfaction. But every action of the organization has to result enhanced profitability or maintained profitability for the organization.
2. Key Success Factors: These are nonfinancial factors which have an effect on the economic viability of the organization.
Cost, quality, time and innovation are important key success factors. Management accounting systems need to have provisions for tracking the performance of the organization and its divisions as well as competitors on these success factors.
3. Continuous improvement: Continuous improvement or kaizen is a popular theme. Innovation related to this area in costing is kaizen costing .
4. Value Chain and Supply Chain Analysis: Value chain as a strategic framework for analysis of competitive advantage was promoted by Michael Porter. Management accountants have to become familiar with the framework and provide information to implement the framework by strategic planners.

Environmental management practices deeply evolved during last decades: both businesses and authorities are now trying to integrate the widest possible range of economic impacts induced by their environmental strategies. Some theories and empirical studies have described and tested the relationships between environmental and economic performance and they proved that « win-win » situations exist: Pollution prevention projects particularly illustrate such situations.

Private firms however face some difficulties when trying to identify, assess and track their environmental costs. These difficulties may lead to an inappropriate evaluation of the economic impacts of ecological preservation projects. In this thesis, we test an environmental accounting system, which seems to be the best way to lead environmental management practices toward value creation. Based on the following tools, we try to delvep and consolidate environmental costs knowledge, but also to widen the types and time horizon of the integrated parameters: Material and Energy Flow Accounting, Activity Based Costing, Total Cost Assessment and Monte Carlo simulation.

We then proved, on a specific industrial activity, that a well designed and documented environmental accounting scheme allows identifying and translating strategic environmental issues and showing and quantifying the possible ecological and economic improvement opportunities. Finally, we found that such a system supports decision making by turning it more documented and less biased. The final result of its deployment on the global firm’s perimeter would be to make environmental management more profitable.

Hi

Management accounting or managerial accounting is concerned with the provisions and use of accounting information to managers within organizations, to provide them with the basis to make informed business decisions that will allow them to be better equipped in their management and control functions.

In contrast to financial accountancy information, management accounting information is:

* designed and intended for use by managers within the organization, whereas financial accounting information is designed for use by shareholders and creditors.
* usually confidential and used by management, instead of publicly reported;
* forward-looking, instead of historical;
* computed by reference to the needs of managers, often using management information systems, instead of by reference to financial accounting standards.


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