Loose Leaf for Cost Management: A Strategic Emphasis

Edward J. Blocher is an emeritus professor of accounting at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His undergraduate degree (economics) is from Rice University, his MBA from Tulane University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Blocher has presented regularly on strategic cost management at the national meetings of both the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). While he is involved in a number of accounting organizations, Professor Blocher has been most continually active in the IMA, where he has been a member of the IMA's Research Foundation. He is a certified management accountant (CMA), has taught review courses for the CMA exam, and has served on the IMA's national education committee. He has supervised or participated in the direction of several doctoral students, many of whom prepared dissertations in management accounting. Professor Blocher is also the author or co-author of several articles in management accounting and in other areas of accounting and has served as associate editor and reviewer for a number of accounting journals. He has a 2009 article in Issues in Accounting Education on the topic of teaching strategic cost management. Putting research and teaching into practice is important to Professor Blocher, who has worked closely with other firms and organizations in developing products, publications, and teaching materials. He was a member of the task force for the IMA that developed a new definition of management accounting in 2008. From 2010-2014, he served as a member of the joint curriculum task force of the Management Accounting Section (MAS) of the AAA and the IMA, which was charged with the responsibility of developing curriculum recommendations for accounting education. The task force has two recent publications in Issues in Accounting Education. Also, he has provided expert testimony and has consulted with a number of organizations regarding cost management matters. Paul E. Juras is the Vander Wolk Professor of Managerial Accounting and Operational Performance and Chair of the Accountancy and Law Division at Babson College. Previously he was a professor of accountancy at Wake Forest University. He earned both his BBA and MBA at Pace University and his Ph.D. from Syracuse University. He is a certified management accountant (CMA) and has a certified public accountant (CPA) license from New York. Professor Juras has experience in strategic management accounting. He has published articles and cases in many journals, including the Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance, Issues in Accounting Education, The CPA Journal, and Strategic Finance. He has made numerous presentations at meetings of both the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). In 2014, he received the IMA's Lybrand Gold Medal, awarded to the author(s) of the outstanding article of the year published in Strategic Finance, and in 2015 he received the IMA's R. Lee Brummet Award for Distinguished Accounting Educators. Professor Juras teaches managerial accounting and strategic cost management courses and has taught in the undergraduate program, the Masters of Science in Accountancy program, and the MBA program at Wake Forest University. He has also taught in the undergraduate, the full-time MBA, the evening MBA, and the blended-learning MBA programs at Babson College. While he was active in CAM-I, the Consortium for Advanced Management-International, and has served in leadership roles in the Management Accounting Section of the AAA, Professor Juras dedicates most of his efforts outside the classroom to the IMA. He is currently a member of the IMA Global Board of Directors and serves as Chairman of the Institute of Certified Management Accountants, the organization responsible for the CMA certification. In addition, Professor Juras served a three-year term as the chair of the IMA Research Foundation and 10 years as an associate editor of the IMA Educational Case Journal. Gary M. Cokins, CPIM, is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in advanced cost management and performance improvement systems. He has received CAM-I's Robert A. Bonsack Award for Distinguished Contributions in Advanced Cost Management and was the lead author of the highly regarded An ABC Manager's Primer (Irwin, IMA, CAM-I, 1992.