CGMA Exam - Case Study Guide

chapter 3 Integrating skills and knowledge

Chapter learning objectives

• After completing this chapter, you should be able to recognise how the management accounting knowledge areas and skills are integrated within the case study tasks.

1 Scenarios and tasks—integrating the skills

In the previous chapter we considered each competency in isolation. It is important that you understand how these competencies will be linked in the examination. We can now bring together these skills into a series of integrated tasks.

Consider the following short scenario:

Scenario—Company XYZ

XYZ Ltd is a privately owned travel company operating out of ten travel shops based in major towns in the South East of the UK. For some time now the board have been concerned as to the downward trend in customers visiting their shops and were considering rationalising their high street presence and staffing numbers.

The company offers a range of holidays focusing on the mass and cheaper end of the market. Sales have grown for each of the last five years at 10 per cent per year but unfortunately profits have not risen at the same rate. The company has used price as the main source of competitive advantage being more concerned with financial results than customer service. Many of the processes associated with vacation bookings operated by XYZ are manual and there is still a significant amount of face to face customer contact, the details of which often go unrecorded.

Customer complaints are rising with some 15 ...