Creating Competitive Advantage Boards are increasingly looking to CFOs to participate in, if not drive, corporate strategy. Most financial professionals can identify a strategy that provides a competitive advantage when they see one but may not know where to look for it. In this session, a veteran CFO will lead you through the strategy development process and then show you how to turn your organization's search for competitive advantage into reality.

Objective: Understand how to identify a strategy that will give your organization a competitive advantage. Profitable Pricing Three things can happen in pricing, and two of them are bad. Overpriced products are a missed opportunity, whereas underpriced products give away your products at a loss. When sales and accounting personnel fail to work together, the company risks becoming its industry’s “dumb” competitor. Accountants involved in pricing can help the company understand the difference between “dog” and “gravy” opportunities with knowledge that directly translates into an improved profitability. You will leave this session understanding why the company with the best cost information wins!

Objective: Understand how to improve profit through involvement with your organization’s pricing process. Contemporary Cost Concepts Bad cost analysis leads to bad decision making. Traditional cost accounting provides the average cost of an average product, produced in an average volume and sold to an average customer. Traditional techniques can be disastrously inaccurate when trying to understand products that are not average in every way. This session explains activitybased costing and why it gives your company a competitive advantage.

Objective: Understand why a superior cost knowledge will provide your company a competitive advantage. Cost and Pricing Models: Creating an Effective Tool If sales increase, so should profits. Yet, the opposite result often leaves executives scratching their heads. When organizations work with inferior cost information, they make mistakes in four specific situations. Bad information causes sellers to overprice easy, high-volume work and underprice difficult, low-volume work. This session discusses how to use activity-based costing data to build accurate costing models that consider far more than just the labor and materials necessary to provide goods and services.

Objective: Understand how to create models that will assure your organization is selling its products at a profitable price.