NEW Approaches to Cost Management & Reduction

Early Bird Discount

Book before 9 March 2012 and pay only £399 +VAT per delegate, rather than the usual course price of £449 +VAT

Target Audience

Finance directors, managers and staff with responsibility for managing and controlling the costs of their organisations

Directors and managers with budget responsibility

Course Programme

Choosing the right approach to cost reduction

• What is the extent of the cost reduction pressures you are facing?
• Radical cost reduction or continuous improvement
• A middle way - rebalancing of resources

Difficulties of reducing costs

• Difficulty of assessing value delivered
• Danger of simplistic cost cutting
• Failure of budgeting processes to manage costs

Avoiding cuts to strategically important capabilities

• Understanding the business imperatives
• Identifying where greatest value will be added
• Techniques for creating cost reduction plans that support the strategic imperatives

Effective implementation

• The value of involving people in identifying change opportunities
• Understanding the psychology of change
• Six key models for managing change
• Identifying good performance measures for tracking implementation - and avoiding bad ones

Techniques for reducing costs

• Restructuring
• Activity analysis
• Value for money analysis
• Process improvement
• Rebalancing resources
• Avoiding unprofitable products/services and customers
• Purchasing effectively
• Benchmarking
• Reducing assets
• Performance management

Course Director

David Baines is a Director of Freeman Baines Consulting.  He holds a degree in Electronic Engineering from Imperial College, and an MBA from the London Business School.  After a career in BT he moved into consulting, becoming a partner in a major UK firm before establishing his own consultancy.

He is an Associate of the National School of Government, working in the fields of Organisational Development, Management Development & Skills and Managing Change.

Over the last 27 years he has consulted extensively in both the public and private sectors.  He has written several management books covering planning, forecasting and budgeting, overhead cost reduction, organisational restructuring, performance measurement and business process re-engineering.

In addition to consulting, David develops and presents courses and workshops on a range of topics.  He uses his consulting experience to ensure that the contents are anchored to approaches that work in practice and include the latest trends in management thinking and techniques.