Cost Management: A Strategic Emphasis

Cost Management: A Strategic Emphasis, by Blocher/Stout/Juras/Cokins is dedicated to answering the question: Why Cost Management? Blocher et al. provide the cost-management tools and techniques needed to support an organisation's competitiveness, improve its performance, and help the organisation accomplish its strategy. The text is written to help students understand the broader role of cost accounting in helping an organisation succeed - and not just the measurement of costs. While the text does include coverage of traditional costing topics (e.g., job-order costing, process costing, service-department cost allocations, and accounting for joint and by-products), its primary strength is the linkage of these topics, as well as more contemporary topics, to an organisation's strategy. This message is reinforced by a dynamic author team, all four of whom have close ties to current cost management practice.

Edward J. Blocher is an emeritus professor of accounting at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His undergraduate degree (economics) is from Rice University, his MBA from Tulane University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Blocher has presented regularly on strategic cost management at the national meetings of both the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
While he is involved in a number of accounting organizations, Professor Blocher has been most continually active in the IMA, where he has been a member of the IMA's Research Foundation. He is a certified management accountant (CMA), has taught review courses for the CMA exam, and has served on the IMA's national education committee. He has supervised or participated in the direction of several doctoral students, many of whom prepared dissertations in management accounting. Professor Blocher is also the author or co-author of several articles in management accounting and in other areas of accounting and has served as associate editor and reviewer for a number of accounting journals. He has a 2009 article in Issues in Accounting Education on the topic of teaching strategic cost management.
Putting research and teaching into practice is important to Professor Blocher, who has worked closely with other firms and organizations in developing products, publications, and teaching materials. He was a member of the task force for the IMA that developed a new definition of management accounting in 2008. From 2010-2014, he served as a member of the joint curriculum task force of the Management Accounting Section (MAS) of the AAA and the IMA, which was charged with the responsibility of developing curriculum recommendations for accounting education. The task force has two recent publications in Issues in Accounting Education. Also, he has provided expert testimony and has consulted with a number of organizations regarding cost management matters.

David E. Stout is currently the Director of the Master of Accounting (MAcc) programs at Villanova University. From 2003-2017 David was the John S. and Doris M. Andrews Professor of Accounting at Youngstown State University. Previously, he was the John M. Cooney Professor of Accounting at Villanova University. Prior to this, he served as a faculty member at Rider University. David earned his Ph.D. in accounting (1982) from the Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh. He served previously as editor of Issues in Accounting Education and as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Accounting Education. Professor Stout has published over 100 articles in professional and academic journals, including Advances in Accounting Education, Issues in Accounting Education, the Journal of Accounting Education, The Accounting Educators' Journal, Advances in International Accounting, Behavioral Research in Accounting (BRIA), The CPA Journal, Educational and Psychological Measurement, the IMA Educational Case Journal, Managerial Finance, Management Accounting, Management Accounting Quarterly, Financial Practice and Education, Strategic Finance, and Advances in Accounting. David is past president of the Teaching, Learning & Curriculum (TLC) Section of the AAA, past president of the Academy of Business Education (ABE), and past president of the Ohio Region, American Accounting Association (AAA). During the period 2011-2014, he served as a member of the AAA Board of Directors. In 2007, he received the R. Lee Brummet Award for Distinguished Accounting Educators, Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), and the Ohio Outstanding Accounting Educator Award, which is co-sponsored by the Ohio Society of CPAs and the AAA's Ohio Region. In 2008, David received the Distinguished Achievement in Accounting Education Award from the AICPA, and the Distinguished Service Award for Educators given by the IMA. Also in 2008, David was inducted into the Hall of Honor, TLC Section of the AAA and was selected by Ohio Magazine as one of Ohio's Outstanding College and University Teachers. In 2012, he was a co-recipient of the Jim Bulloch Award for Innovations in Management Accounting Education, an award given annually by the Management Accounting Section (MAS) of the AAA and sponsored by the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). In 2015, Professor Stout was the recipient of the 2015 American Accounting Association (AAA) Outstanding Educator Award. From 2010-2016, he served as a member of the joint curriculum task force of the Management Accounting Section (MAS) of the AAA and the IMA, which was charged with the responsibility of developing curricular recommendations for accounting education. In 2016, David received the Lifetime Service Award from the AAA for his contributions to accounting education. In 2017, he received the AAA Ohio Region President's Award for Lifetime Exemplary service to the region.

Paul E. Juras is the Vander Wolk Professor of Managerial Accounting and Operational Performance and Chair of the Accountancy and Law Division at Babson College. Previously he was a professor of accountancy at Wake Forest University. He earned both his BBA and MBA at Pace University and his Ph.D. from Syracuse University. He is a certified management accountant (CMA) and has a certified public accountant (CPA) license from New York. Professor Juras has experience in strategic management accounting. He has published articles and cases in many journals, including the Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance, Issues in Accounting Education, The CPA Journal, and Strategic Finance. He has made numerous presentations at meetings of both the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). In 2014, he received the IMA's Lybrand Gold Medal, awarded to the author(s) of the outstanding article of the year published in Strategic Finance, and in 2015 he received the IMA's R. Lee Brummet Award for Distinguished Accounting Educators.

Professor Juras teaches managerial accounting and strategic cost management courses and has taught in the undergraduate program, the Masters of Science in Accountancy program, and the MBA program at Wake Forest University. He has also taught in the undergraduate, the full-time MBA, the evening MBA, and the blended-learning MBA programs at Babson College.

While he was active in CAM-I, the Consortium for Advanced Management-International, and has served in leadership roles in the Management Accounting Section of the AAA, Professor Juras dedicates most of his efforts outside the classroom to the IMA. He is currently a member of the IMA Global Board of Directors and serves as Chairman of the Institute of Certified Management Accountants, the organization responsible for the CMA certification. In addition, Professor Juras served a three-year term as the chair of the IMA Research Foundation and 10 years as an associate editor of the IMA Educational Case Journal.

Gary M. Cokins, CPIM, is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in advanced cost management and performance improvement systems. He has received CAM-I's Robert A. Bonsack Award for Distinguished Contributions in Advanced Cost Management and was the lead author of the highly regarded An ABC Manager's Primer (Irwin, IMA, CAM-I, 1992.