الفهرس 
Chapter One: Research Frame workOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Severe competition, technological improvements, shorter product life cycle and intense global competition, all these factors have pressured most firms to search for new ideas, tools and techniques that enable them to compete and in many cases to survive. Most of these firms are facing the urge to respond rapidly and efficiently to changing customer needs, wants and tastes. For these firms to remain in the market and survive they are forced to look for new ways to compete, such as increasing production through system simplification and incremental improvements and mostly cost reduction and quality enhancements.
Three basic factors are needed by firms, whether transnational or domestic, which are cost, quality and time. Of these factors, cost reduction and control has received most of the attention in the accounting literature in prior years. This could be attributed to the current highly competitive and constantly changing environment that offers important managerial opportunities as well as challenges and therefore motivates managers to adopt strategic cost management tools. Many of the firms that adopted those tools were driven by a compelling event or crisis such as a loss of a main customer or the entry of new strong competitor. A clear example of such driving events is the entrance of several Japanese manufacturers in the American and European market, which promotes many American and European firms to adopt new strategies. Other firms have adopted strategic cost management tools based on the firm’s motivating vision such as Disney.”While crisis creates stress, a motivating vision creates an opportunity in either case the most important issue for success is to have resolved to make things different” (Melsa 2007, p 2).
Firms that adopted the strategic cost management tools were attempting to find new solutions to new problems. That is why searching for creative approaches for problems solving is of utmost importance. While trying to look at a novel approach, attention has been focused on Japanese techniques and that is mainly because Japan’s short time span resurrection has been a revelation. In just four decades, Japan has grown from just being an agricultural based economy to be the third largest trader in the world (Hayes 1981).
Over the past decades, the need to continuously improve on a large scale within the organization has emerged and became a necessity for survival and development. This has led to the development of continuous improvement techniques which are based on improving quality, eliminating waste, simplifying production line, meeting continuously increasing customer satisfaction standards, reducing manufacturing cost, eliminating non value adding activities. Some of these techniques are lean manufacturing, six sigma, and balanced scorecard and lean six sigma. Much of the recent accounting literature, has examined those techniques in different environments with the focus on continuous improvement or Kaizen approach (Nieuwoudt 2012).