Adoption, Importance and Barriers to the Implementation of Contemporary Management Accounting Practices: Evidence from Egypt

Abstract

Nowadays, complexity in the business environment, and advanced technology intensified the challenges for more management accounting information to meet global competition. Therefore, contemporary management accounting practices have emerged which focused on financial and non-financial information to support managers’ decision making. The research aimed at examining the adoption, importance and barriers to the implementation of CMAPs. To achieve the research aim a list of forty MAPs, 171 questionnaires and factor analysis were used. In terms of MAPs adoption the results indicated 9 factors :fundamental TMAPs; control; WCM; performance evaluation non-financial; budgeting for planning cash flows ;contemporary decision support; traditional decision support; planning and capital budget practice. In terms of importance there are 10 factors; benchmarking practices; costing and decision support; fundamental TMAPs; traditional performance evaluation; control; contemporary performance evaluation; budget for planning day to day; WCM –MRP practice, product life cycle practice and performance evaluation – customer satisfaction. The main conclusion was the relative adoption of TMAPs are higher than CMAPs however, the Egyptian companies are realizing the importance of large number of CMAPs. Moreover, the research examined barriers that could limit the implementation of CMAPs and revealed that the highest barriers were; it takes longer time to change the societal values and practices, high degree of uncertainty avoidance and high cost to implement these advanced practices respectively.