Study On The Strategic Cost Management In Universities

Chinese universities meet too many opportunities and challenges in the 21th century. For accommodating to new competitive circumstances, promoting the efficiency of educational resource distribution ad strengthening cost management is very important. For meeting with this purpose, we try to use the strategic cost management (SCM) into universities and firstly put forward the concept of the SCM in universities for increasing the power of managing universities, improving their competition capacities, and ensuring sustainable development ability.At first, the theory of the constitution, development, characters and significances and others of SCM were summarized in this paper. Putting the SCM in universities in practice will necessarily facilitate universities' own advantages and improve the management of universities. The internal-external condition changes and impacting factors have been analyzed and summed-up next, they are: one, the new trends of international educational environments; two, the new characters of universities in societal innovations in china; three, the new requests of universities' management after our nation becoming new members in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Based on viewing the universities' environmental changes, we analyze and illuminate several limiting factors of the SCM in Chinese universities, such as the lag of management of universities, deficiency of inner running mechanism, costing non-standardization, the low level of manager, etc. All of these analyses show that it is necessary to conduct the SCM in Chinese universities.Secondly, the feasibility of the SCM in universities is expatiated in this paper. We focus on cost analysis of the SCM in universities: One, universities' strengths and weaknesses are analyzed systemically by Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) method; Two, how to analyses the relationships between up-stream and down-stream connections and set up connection between universities and government, between universities and students, between universities and society or others through universities' external value-chain analysis are discussed by using systemic management theory and value-chain analysis principle in the base of internal value-chain analysis ; Finally, cost driver analysis and its' action on cost management in universities are elucidated in this paper.Thirdly, the approaches to perform the SCM in universities are discussed to try to increase the practicability of the SCM in universities including target constitution, cost calculation, cost control and evaluating management performance. At last, some feasible advices are put forward, which is about setting up everyone's consciousness of the SCM in universities, creating healthy circumstance of the SCM in universities, perfecting the system of SCM in universities, improving techniques of the SCM in universities and enhancing the ability of manipulators of the SCM in universities.