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nd enhance the companies' efficiency. The new technology could also be applied to the monitoring performance area. For instance, factories could profit from the use of beepers and mobile phones to monitor workers' performance, while restaurants could benefit from the use of beepers in their operating system.(Zimmerman, 2009) There are also many other elements could cause the market condition changing, such as the commencement of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) could decrease companies' cost among Mexico, Canada and the United States. American and Canadian companies may set their factories in Mexico for the lower labour cost. The same situations have also emerged in China, Vietnam and some other developing countries.(Zimmerman, 2009) The new business environment also bring a huge revolution in the other fields, for example the demand of more quality control, customer-focused, the intellectual capital, automation, increasing overheads, decreasing direct labour cost and more emphasis on environmental and external issues.

The drawbacks of traditional management accounting
-The traditional management accounting was driven by the external financial requirements but not the internal or actual need. For instance, it fails to compare the cost with the competitors, which is a fatal factor in the business competition.

-Tends to be too technical

Many accountants focus on their contribution only in the financial numbers, but ignore the other useful information which the users may require. (Pierce and O'Dea, 2003)

-Most companies still use single overhead allocation base

-Time Limitation

Pierce and O'Dea (2003) found that most managers complained that the traditional information system cannot provide timeliness information to the users. For example, some managers reflected that even though the financial information could cover almost all they needed, but they cannot use it timely cause the information lag. It could extremely influence their decision making process.

-Mainly focus on the internal performance of the organization but ignoring the other activities, such as external and social issues.

-Paying too much attention on the manufacturing but neglecting the high cost post-conversion activities.

The change of management accounting
A UK research project claimed that management accounting had not changed over six decades in Britain. (Burns et al., 1999) Despite there are some substantial improvement in the technological and environmental areas.(Johnson, Kaplan , 1987)

Several studies revealed that the traditional management accounting system and techniques were still valuable and some new management accounting techniques were not widely used as expectation, such as activity-based costing (ABC) and strategic management accounting.(Burns et al., 1999)

However, the advancement of information technology could enhance the management accounting into a higher level, which means that managers could have a direct and real time access to the information instead of waiting for the accountants sort it out.(Burns et al., 1999) It could make managers conducting the accountants' task by themselves, for instance budgeting, analyze and calculation. (Burns et al., 1999)

This change has brought a more significant effect on forecasting rather than budgeting.(Hope