Since 1950s, the world has entered a new era (some people call it post-industrial era or catastrophe era). After entering the 1950s, great changes have taken place in customers' demands. Compared with the past, the political, economic, cultural and natural environment in which enterprises are located is more competitive, and the rapid development of science and technology makes enterprises face many severe challenges and many unpredictable emergencies. The main feature of this era is that (1) the demand structure has changed. The demand for basic consumer goods has reached saturation, and the society has shifted from the demand for "quantity" to the demand for "quality" of life, and the demand has undergone diversified changes. (2) the level of science and technology has been continuously improved. It has promoted and accelerated the development of products and manufacturing technology, produced many products with "creative demand" and strengthened the competition among enterprises. (3) Global competition is becoming increasingly fierce. Capital export and the rapid development of multinational corporations not only provide new opportunities for enterprises, but also bring great risks to enterprises. (4) Society, government and customers put forward requirements and restrictions on enterprises. Due to economic fluctuations, inflation, monopolistic behavior, environmental pollution, etc. Society, government and customers are dissatisfied with the enterprise, which puts forward requirements and many restrictions on the enterprise. (5) Shortage of resources and frequent emergencies. These characteristics make the outside of the enterprise a particularly huge, complex, unfamiliar, changing and unpredictable environment, and enterprises are facing many life-and-death challenges. In this case, it is imperative for enterprises to deeply analyze the environment, adopt new management methods, seek the survival and development of enterprises, and strengthen strategic management such as business strategy. With the change of management concept, many new management technologies have emerged, such as quality cost management and activity-based cost management.
It is precisely because of the change of the times that the business environment of enterprises has changed and promoted the development of management science. In line with this development trend, strategic management came into being. The core of strategic management is to seek the lasting competitive advantage of enterprises. Competitive advantage is the core of all strategies. In the final analysis, it comes from the value that enterprises can create for customers, which exceeds the cost of creation. Value is the price that customers are willing to pay for what they need. Excess value comes from providing equal benefits at a price lower than that of competitors, or providing extraordinary benefits enough to offset their high prices. There are two basic forms of competitive advantage, namely, cost leadership and uniqueness (novelty). In order to gain competitive advantage, enterprises need to make choices, that is, on which advantage and within what scope they need to strive for and make choices. The idea of "everything should be ahead of time and everyone should be satisfied" will only lead to mediocre strategy and low economic benefits, because it often means that an enterprise has no competitive advantage at all.
The above changes in enterprise management concept and management technology have had a great impact on traditional cost management, which requires cost management to update its concept and change its technology. Experts and scholars in cost management must face the fact that (1) strategic management requires obtaining competitive cost information. If the cost manager can't provide relevant information, the production supervisor and marketing manager will expand their information systems. If so, it will inevitably lead to confusion in enterprise management. An organization can only have one cost information system.
(2) In the new management environment, the defects of traditional cost management accounting (such as management ideas, management methods, management objects, etc.). ) undoubtedly exposed. To change these defects, we must seek new management ideas, technologies and methods. In order to meet the needs of strategic management, on the one hand, cost management accounting is introduced into enterprise strategic management and integrated with it. On the other hand, the strategic management thought is introduced into cost management accounting to realize the function expansion in the strategic sense, thus forming strategic cost management (SCM). Strategic cost management was first put forward by British scholars in 1980s, and American scholar Michael Porter devoted chapters to "cost advantage" in two books: Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage. Cost advantage is one of the two competitive advantages that an enterprise may have. Cost is also extremely important for a unique strategy, because a unique enterprise must maintain costs similar to those of its competitors. Unless the resulting premium exceeds the unique cost, the unique person cannot achieve excellent performance. Enterprise managers have realized the important position of cost in competition, and many strategic plans aim at establishing "cost leadership" or "cost reduction". If an enterprise can achieve and maintain the overall cost leadership, then as long as it can make the price equal to or close to the industry average price level, it will become the leader of its industry. When the price of a cost-leading enterprise is equal to or lower than that of its competitors, its cost position will be transformed into high income. However, a cost-leading enterprise cannot ignore the uniqueness of its products. Once the products of the cost-leading enterprise are considered to be incomparable or unacceptable with the products of other manufacturers in the eyes of customers, the enterprise has to reduce the price to make it lower than its competitors in order to increase sales. This may offset the benefits of its favorable cost position. On the basis of Porter's research, American scholars published the monograph Strategic Cost Management (J 1K 1shank, etc. ) in 1993, the strategic cost management is more specific. In recent years, in developed countries such as Britain, America and Japan, strategic cost management has become a powerful weapon for enterprises to strengthen cost management and gain competitive advantage. Japanese scholars have further extended strategic cost management to the business community (Xia Kuanyun, 1998).
It is not difficult to see that the emergence of strategic cost management is to meet the needs of enterprise strategic management on the one hand, and the defects of traditional cost management system and the needs of its own reform on the other hand.