Vergelijkbare opleidingen
Opleiding: Executive Master Class in Controllership
Leerdoel
Become a top expert in your field!
The Executive Master Class in Controllership is an advanced management programme designed for professionals with a specific interest in accounting and control. This international and unique learning experience will prepare you for the challenges posed by increasing global competition!
Why this programme
Controllers play a central role in a company’s planning and control processes and financial management. Increasingly, controllers are also actively involved in top management decisions concerning automation projects and mergers & acquisitions, and very often they play a key role in organisational change processes.
As a controller, you do not only need to have a thorough knowledge of your own field, but you should also acquire an adequate background in certain management areas, such as strategic management and business information systems. This programme will prepare you for a more central role in your organisation!
The Vlerick approach
All candidates for the programme are screened to ensure that the group is properly matched in terms of background and experience.
To ensure a practical and action-oriented approach, case studies, group work and integration exercises are the primary teaching methods during the programme. Participants will be challenged to deal with real-life situations, apply the appropriate concepts and techniques, decide upon a course of action and discuss their recommendations in class. In addition, senior executives will address the group at regular times to illustrate major issues raised during the course with their personal experience.
Doelgroep
This programme is designed for junior and senior professionals who have a strong interest in accounting and control, including:
- management accountants,
- controllers,
- finance managers,
- financial directors,
- auditors
- consultants with an interest in finance and cost management.
Programma
Module 1: Opening seminar
Refresher course: Finance & Cost Accounting (Residential seminar)
The opening seminar gives participants an introduction to the practice of controllership. The seminar covers broad topics that relate to the controller’s profession and focuses on the basic concepts and techniques of financial analysis, cost accounting and management control.
Topics taught in this module are: analysis of balance sheets and profit and loss statements, assessing the financial health of an organisation by using ratios, the use of fixed and variable costs for decision-making purposes, and the technique of full costing versus direct costing. In addition, the visioning process will be illustrated by numerous examples.
During this seminar, participants will be invited to solve several business problems in small groups. This opening seminar is residential.
Module 2: Core courses
Strategic Management
The strategic management session starts from the proposition that strategy is a decision-making process that is used to resolve the field of tension between objectives, the requirements of the environment, and available resources. The end-point of this process is the development of a sustainable competitive advantage, which forms the foundation for the organisation’s long-term profitability and continuity. The strategy module presents tools for establishing the desired future of the enterprise: the strategic intention, the mission, the objectives and ‘business definition’. Models for analysing the environment and identifying opportunities and threats are then discussed.
The objective of this module is to provide participants with a number of conceptual frameworks in areas such as strategic planning, industry analysis, management of core competences and strategic investment decisions.
Module 3: Advanced Management Control I: The Management Control Structure
Management control systems are tools for implementing strategies. Strategies differ from organisation to organisation, and controls should be tailored to the needs of these strategies. Management control is aimed at steering management’s behaviour towards the objectives that have been set by the organisation. With the mission, strategy and objectives as a basis, a management control structure, culture and process should be set up. An important part in this process is monitoring the extent to which the organisation’s objectives have been achieved − in other words, the organisation’s performance. During this course, we focus on the various organisational issues that controllers are confronted with when implementing strategies. The question to be answered is: “Is the structure of the organisation optimal for realising the strategy and action plans of the organisation?” Various options are possible for inducing the right behaviour within an organisation: the functional, divisional, matrix or network organisation. Furthermore, we describe the concept of responsibility centres (e.g. profit or cost centres), which will have a major impact on the performance of the organisation. In addition, transfer prices will be introduced to complete discussions on the management control structure.
Module 4: Advanced Management Control II: The Management Control Process
Once the optimal control structure is in place, a management control process should be set up.
One of the key elements in this process is the budgeting process. Budgets are an important tool for short-term planning and control in organisations. During this module, we focus on the various techniques that can be used to set up a budget. In addition, the pros and cons of ‘Beyond Budgeting’ are discussed.
This leads to performance measurement and the Balanced Scorecard, which connects the performance criteria, the mission and the strategy of the organisation.
At the end of this module, participants will have gained insight into management control processes, performance measurement, reward systems, the Balanced Scorecard, the Strategy Focused Organisation and Value Based Management. Throughout the sessions, attention will be paid to the behavioural considerations involved when implementing these systems.
Module 5: Corporate Finance
Companies face two broad financial questions: ‘What investments should our company make?’ and ‘How should we pay for those investments?’. The first question involves spending money; the second involves raising it. Assessing the long-term financial health of a company is an important task for the controller. History abounds with examples of companies that embarked upon overly ambitious programmes only to discover that their portfolio could not be financed on acceptable terms.
The key issue in assessing the long-term financial health of an organisation is whether or not the corporate system of goals, product-market strategies, investment requirements and financing capabilities are in balance.
This course focuses on the problems of corporate financial management: cost of capital, investment decision analysis, capital structure, debt policy, debt financing, working capital management and valuation issues.
Module 6: Advanced Management Accounting I
The focus of this course is the role of management accounting information in organisations. More specifically, management accounting systems provide information to assist managers in their planning and control activities. This includes gathering, classifying, processing, and analysing information and reporting to management.
Unlike the financial accounting information prepared for external reporting, management accounting information should be designed to help decision-making within the organisation. The role of management accountants is evolving. No longer scorekeepers of past performance, they have become value-adding members of management teams, creating information vital to enhancing operational excellence and formulating and implementing new strategies.
This module focuses on how cost information can be used to support strategic decisions. Topics include: Activity-Based Costing (Rate-Based ABC and Time-Driven ABC), activity-based management, activity-based budgeting, and target costing.
Module 7: Advanced Management Accounting II
The second module on Advanced Management Accounting provides deeper insight into the use of management accounting systems in different decision-making situations.
ABC systems can be used for several purposes, such as gaining insight into the drivers of your costs or setting up a Customer Profitability Analysis in order to segment customers into value creators and value destroyers.
Recently, ABC systems have been used as input to a ‘Total Cost of Ownership’ approach when making investment decisions.
When companies make decisions about their investments, one of the most common problems controllers encounter is the seemingly simple issue of how much does it cost? Most of the time, it is easy to calculate the purchase price, but a lot of investment projects also include the costs of maintenance and conversion to the new situation. When analysts do not use a total cost of ownership approach, they find themselves wondering why costs keep going up, even after successful project implementations.
During this module, we drill deeper into the use of ABC to set up a Customer Profitability Analysis and we introduce the concept of ‘Total Cost of Ownership’.
Module 8: Business and IT Alignment
Controllers depend greatly on information. They need to know how a competitive advantage can be created through the use of information systems and technology, including database management systems, decision support systems, the Internet, Intranets and ERP systems. These information systems are powerful software packages that enable businesses to integrate a variety of disparate functions. In particular, ERP systems can provide the foundation for a wide range of e-commerce based ordering and order tracing processes, inventory management and built-to-order goods.
The objective of this course is to help improve the participants’ ability to assess the potential benefits of new information technologies. At the end of this module, participants will have a thorough understanding of the issues involved when implementing business intelligence systems.
Module 9: International Accounting
The field of accounting has had a notable international history and promises to have an even more significant future. Like the other functional areas of business, accounting has changed − from rudimentary towards more complex and sophisticated − as the environment it serves has changed. The study of international accounting involves two major areas: descriptive/comparative accounting and the accounting dimensions of international transactions/multinational enterprises. The natural progression of an organisation engaged in international business is to export and import goods and services before entering into strategic alliances or investments abroad. Foreign investment becomes more complex when a company’s financial statements are expressed in one currency but must be restated in another.
In this course, participants acquire an understanding of the various accounting principles that are currently used in different countries (IFRS, US GAAP, Sarbanes-Oxley, ...) and how these rules influence the balance sheet and the profit and loss statement.
Module 10: Closing seminar
This programme seeks to support the participants in the business challenges they face today and the opportunities they’ll discover tomorrow. In real business life, controllers not only operate within a certain business, they are also members of the management team and are responsible for motivating and guiding their own team. Therefore, during this closing seminar, we focus on the development of your general management abilities, such as interpersonal and communication skills, leadership and the use of the management cockpit as a management tool. The closing seminar is residential.
In-company project
After successfully completing the core courses, participants are requested to execute an in-company project, which allows them to translate their knowledge into business practice. Through this in-company project, participants have to leverage the knowledge and experience acquired during the programme in their own company. This project is carried out under the supervision of a faculty advisor and an internal company advisor.
Participants are free to choose the subject of their project. The scope of the project should be defined so that it can be completed within a 6-month period.
Toelatingseisen
You should have at least 3 years of professional work experience in the field of management accounting or management control.
Opleiding kerngegevens