Key Success Factors

Learning Objective 3: Identify the dimensions of performance that customers are expecting of companies

Fuck me this part of the chapter is nothing but bullet points.

• Cost and Efficiency
• Consumers are cheap fucks and better price points win them over. 
• Quality
• Unfortunately you can't sell them dogshit dog shit. They want high quality dog shit.
• Total Quality Management (TQM): An integrative philosophy of management for continuously improving the quality of products and processes. In short, everyone in the value chain is responsible for delivering quality dog shit. Some of the goals include: Meeting customer needs and wants, making zero (or very few) defects and waste products, and to minimize inventory.
• Time
• Time has many dimensions, but the two most important are new product development time and customer response time.
• New Product Development time means that consumers always want the latest and greatest thing, and people are wanting the latest and greatest dog shit faster and faster especially in modern times.
• Customer Response Time is how fast the organization responds to customer requests. If the consumer wants dog shit, how fast can the company deliver?
• Innovation
• More than just product development, it also includes reworking the business from the ground up to keep the company as a whole on the leading edge of dog shit.
• Sustainability
• Organic dog shit. Produced efficiently to provide no waste. Oh and it's recyclable.
• Sustainability is becoming a particularly important factor in this picture. Investors, employees, consumers, and society at large are all continuously placing more and more emphasis on it.
• Investors want companies that can sustainably operate, in a financial, social, and environmental sense.
• Employees tend to work for and are inspired by sustainable companies
• Customers prefer sustainable products
• Many countries and laws nowadays often take action against particularly egregious companies in terms of sustainability and harm to the environment. 

One of the jobs of Management Accountants is to help managers track the key success factors of both their company and their competitors. The information they gather helps set a competitive bar for them to achieve, as well as outline the information needed to continuously improve the company as a whole.

So, what are the dimensions of performance that customers are expecting of companies? They are as follows: Cost, Quality, Time, Innovation, and Sustainability. Customers want cheap, high quality products. They constantly want the latest and greatest thing, and businesses need to respond quickly to their market demands. In order to do achieve this, businesses should always aim to innovate and reinvent themselves to be on the leading edge, as well as maintain sustainability both to keep their company alive in the long term and to please everyone else in the room.