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onds techniques a step further, to include the collection of customers' information, products and markets in order to sustain competitive advantage. Roslender and Hart (2010) identified 'target costing and life-cycle costing as examples of SMA, together with strategic cost management' (Roslender and Hart, 2010).

Strategic management accounting consists of various techniques. This include target costing, the balance scorecard and value chain analysis. Target costing derives the full cost of producing a product through selling price and the target profit. Under this technique, the selling price of a product is given by the analysis of an entity's value. The product is developed on the market price and not on what it has cost to produce it, in order to satisfy a consumer's need. Its main target is to minimise the cost of production through changes in design, sourcing of raw material, development of assembly line and production locations.

Target costing mergers different departments of an entity, and gives a proactive approach to cost management. It also minimise the non value-added activities and reduces the time needed for products to reach the market. Target costing approach has a number of limitations. It requires time consuming meetings, and the willingness of the employees to cooperate and develop new ideas. Furthermore the use of cheaper materials may reduce the quality of the products. Today there is a small number of companies who fully adapted this technique in North America. However in Japan manufacturers believe that reducing the cost of production is the most critical measure. As a result a large number of automobile manufacturing, machine tooling and electronic companies are using this technique. Examples include Toyota Motor Corporation, Isuzu Motors, Sony, Nissan, NEC and Toshiba.

Few years ago George Clothing brand of Asda had a target to become the largest schoolware retailer of the UK. Through the extensive use of target costing they have rationalise the sourcing of raw materials, product design, manufacturing locations and logistics, and achieved to sell schoolware at lower prices in the UK. This has led to rationalising their suppliers base by choosing to produce only in the Far East and especially in Bangladesh were labour cost is low and productivity levels are high. As a result after targeting their prices to be lower than their competitors they became the biggest schoolware retailer in the UK.

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is another SMA technique, which was introduced by Kaplan and Norton, (1992). This technique 'enables companies to track financial results while simultaneously monitoring progress in building the capabilities and acquiring the intangible assets they need for future growth' (Kaplan and Norton, 1996). It is used by firms, governments and nonprofit organizations globally, to report quantitative and qualitative measures of performance. It also considers both financial and non-financial objectives to evaluate the performance measures in a single report, and improve internal and external communications to monitor organisation performance against strategic goals. The BSC should link learning and growth, business and production efficiencies, as well as customer value and financial performance. Kaplan and Norton introduced four different groupings to measure both the current and future financial performance of the entity. They were introduced to suppo