The topic is “How Internal Reporting Systems Affect Competitive Success”. The goals can be something along the lines of “Companies spend billions of dollars a year developing, implementing, maintaining, and revising internal reporting systems, such as activity-based costing, customer profitability analyses, and financial modeling techniques. But it is not clear whether the investments in these internal systems generate sufficient returns. The goals are: To understand the design of modern reporting techniques, with the focus on these four: activity-based costing, customer-profitability analysis, capacity planning and utilization, and formal decision-support tools; To explore how firms implement and use these techniques.
