Business Process Management

Stakeholders, Metrics and Quick Wins

Kaycie Clayton

MT400: Business Process Management

Prof. Cuneyt Altinoz

Kaplan University

February 27, 2015

Stakeholders, Metrics and Quick Wins

The Accounting Process of Sony Corporation

Sony Corporation is a multinational establishment located in Minato, Japan. It is involved in the various operations in electronics development, game entertainment as well as financial services. As such, the organization has thousands of business processes that make up its entire business operation. It also deals with various products, which include; films, electronics, and games. The products are produced and sold in different countries. In order to define the gains and losses from these products, as well as record the performance in production, distribution, maintenance and sales, the organization requires a working accounting process.

The accounting process entails gathering information on transactions with external parties from source documents such as receipts (Jeston & Nelis, 2014). This is followed by analysis of the gathered transaction information to determine which accounts will be debit and which will be credited (Hammer & Champy, 1993). The transactions are then recorded in the journal before posting the information in the general ledger. Further, there is the preparation of unadjusted trial balance followed by the adjustment of the journal entries. The process will require posting in the general ledger and the preparation of the adjusted trial balance. From the adjusted trial balance, the preparation of financial statements occurs and consolidated so as to include the transactions of the subsidiaries and the inclusion of the outsourced accounting procedures. Finally, the accounts are then closed, and a post-closing trial balance is prepared.

Stakeholders

The accounting process is used by several stakeholders. Managers use the accounting information to make decisions. Auditors use the accounting information to evaluate the going concern of the company and its general performance. The shareholders of the company use the information to evaluate the value and performance of their investment. Creditors use this information to gauge the creditworthiness of the corporation. New investors will also require accounting information to in making the decisions about whether or not to invest in Sony Corporation.

Goals

Sony Corporation accounting process mission is to operate a world-class Global Finance and Accounting team utilizing global processes and controls to provide the organization with an efficient, cost-effective and scalable solution. The accounting department, thus, has to ensure a reliable, accurate, efficient and effective accounting system that will be used be several stakeholders that depend on or rely on the information from this process. Another accounting goal is to provide the organization with all the required accounting information as or when required. To achieve this, the department has to ensure all the required transactions are done on time so as to provide the daily quarterly and annual accounts at the required time.

Another goal is to provide the true financial performance of the organization. This is achieved when the account reveals all the necessary information from the available documents. The accounting system also aims at incorporating all the Sony product lines' transactions as well as the subsidiaries that deal with the products. The process also needs to incorporate all the international accounting principles and procedures. Being a global organization, the accounting department has to advice the organization in the different countries accounting principles and economic effects on the various accounting procedures as well as cost of producing reliable and accurate accounting information.

Metrics

In order to achieve its goals, the Sony accounting department has to evaluate its performance over time and monitor the progress towards achieving these goals. The accounting process goals also need to be in line with the organization goals and mission (Davenport, 1993). The performance can be measured by measuring the accuracy of the process. The accuracy of the process is evaluated by the amount of errors in the accounting process. It may be defined by the number of errors in each processing stage.

An accounting process should be able to provide accurate information to be used by stakeholders. It could also be evaluated by checking the speed of information processing. An accounting system should be fast enough to produce the required information at the required time. It may be evaluated by the number of transactions the system can process in a given day. Another metric is controlling fraud. This measures the ability of the process to prevent fraud. It can be evaluated by the number of fraud detected in each period or the number of revealed in each period.

Quick Wins

Towards improving the accounting process, the organizations will have to embrace changes in the accounting procedures and methods. This could be attained by the use of new and improved accounting software. Technology has always been at the heart of business process improvement and reengineering. The accounting process today depends a lot on the improvement in software development since the security of information and the speed of processing needs routine review as businesses expand and technology improves (Sadiq, Governatori, & Namiri, 2007). The company can invest in accounting software that is well suited and unique to its accounting procedures.

This will increase the efficiency of the process and the speed of processing transactions. The organization may also decide to segregate the accounting employees so that each employee performs a single task in the process. Segregation of duties implies that an employee deals with the performance of the task he/she has specialized.

The accounting department can thus allocate employee's tasks they are good at and segregate them from doing another task. This will increase the speed of transaction processing and reduce the amount of errors as well as cubing the possibility of frauds. Improving the accounting process will put Sony at a competitive advantage compared to other organization in similar industries.

References

Thomas Davenport (1993) Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology

Michael Hammer, James Champy (1993) Reengineering the Corporation

Jeston, J., & Nelis, J. (2014). Business process management. Routledge.

Sadiq, S., Governatori, G., & Namiri, K. (2007). Modeling control objectives for business process compliance. In Business process management (pp. 149-164). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.