(BQ) Part 2 book "Management accounting retrospect and prospect" has contents: Flexible technologies, fluid organisations and digitisation, cost-co creation and globalisation, the rising tide of change in management accounting. | Chapter 3 Flexible Technologies, Fluid Organisations and Digitisation Introduction The ‘fluid’ organisation is a 21st century phenomenon. In less than a decade, the forces of globalisation, digitisation, technological advance and novel information exchange possibilities have altered the nature of organisational structuring and flows. Depending on business models, industries and markets, some companies today can be free from most physical asset investments and can manifest extreme flexibility and fluidity. They can be rapidly designed and then re-configured and again re-organised to tap into altering markets, products, customer segments and economic opportunities. Not only can fluid organisations alter their cost structures from high fixed cost leverage to variable cost intensity over very short time periods, but they can also redirect corporate strategy almost instantaneously alongside cost re-alignment. But organisational investments in flexibility long preceded the emergence of fluidity. The fluid organisation is a radical transition from the 20th century industrial enterprise. Its flexibility has been enabled by transitioning from a structure that is heavy in fixed assets and that has functional managerial demarcations into one that is eminently changeable and capable of real-time product shifts, service diversification and competitive re-orientation. At times, competition as well as co-operation can be present with other market incumbents. From the early 1970s to the late 1980s, manufacturing and service enterprises invested extensively in a variety of flexible organisational technologies (FOTs). Logistics-based technologies, such as material requirements planning (MRP), developed into comprehensive rationalisation systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (Mouritsen and Hansen, 2006). Just-in-time (JIT) purchasing and production approaches, refined in Japanese firms, were adopted in a variety of forms by enterprises in developed .
