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It is bad when you run all your plants at 85-90 per cent of capacity because everybody has bad excuses and explanations for lack of performance because they lack volume. You can instead ill up most plants and tell these plants: “Now there are no excuses for not reaching the budget”. Then you can take one plant and isolate all of the problems there and then you can always find out what demands and expectations you have for that plant, but you also can expect all others to live up to expectations.This is an example of a buffering tactic (Thompson, 1967) in which one plant absorbs the environmental uncertainty, while all of the others experience stability. In addition, Food Corp also had a buffer product, which ensured that all raw materials were used even when sales fluctuated. As a food producer, Food Corp would not keep perishable goods in a warehouse for longer periods of time. Instead, it could convert raw materials into a special powder product with a long durability. In this way, the unpredictability was handled using a buffer that mitigated the effects on the organization in accordance with the buffering tactics of stockpiling suggested by Thompson (1967).7. Discussion and conclusionsAs mentioned in the beginning, the Beyond Budgeting literature leaves many questions unanswered. For example, if budgets are unsuitable for today’s business environment, why are they still widely used? How can an organization escape the annual fixed performance contract if it does not have any relative performance targets to use instead? Is the Beyond Budgeting model universally adaptable? The experiences reported in the Beyond Budgeting literature may reflect well-functioning management models, and there is certainly much to learn from others’ experiences. However, often “{t}he logic behind what works at top performers, why it works and what will work elsewhere is barely unravelled” (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006, p. 6) in the literature, which, in turn, leads to mindless imitations, as Pfeffer and Sutton (2006) argue in their call for moreevidence-based management.7.1 Reasons for going beyond budgetingAs discussed in Section 5, the arguments made by Food Corp for going Beyond Budgeting are in line with some of the arguments made by Beyond Budgeting proponents, such as Hope and Fraser (2003a) and Bogsnes (2009). In particular, the arguments that budgets restrict organizations from adapting to rapidly changing business environments and that budgeting is a costly process were mentioned by Food Corp. At the time of data collection and in previous years, Food Corp faced environmental uncertainty, which caused large budget deviations and made planning difficult. Food Corp felt that this supported the case for changing the budgeting system. In this regard, Food Corp is an example of an organization that changes its budgeting process because its inance people adhere to the arguments made by Beyond Budgeting proponents. In other words, the supply side of the diffusion process succeeded in “selling” the negative story about traditional budgets (see Bjørnenak, 1997, for more on diffusion theory in connection with management accounting innovations).
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