Improving the understanding of small medium enterprises product costing content course through action research

Abstract

Costing skills (CS) are crucial for achieving competitive advantage. However, Malaysian Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) owner-managers still lack CS. Training programmes provided by the government seem not to have achieved the objective of strengthening SME owner-managers’ CS. Thus, the main objective of this study is to improve a CS course in training programmes of SME in Malaysia by involving SME owner-managers from the beginning of the course improvement process. This study was conducted with the cooperation of Co-operative and Entrepreneurship Improvement Insititute, Universiti Utara Malaysia (CEDI, UUM). To achieve the research objective, this study employed practical action research that involved a cyclical process of planning, acting, observing and reflecting. Practical action research approach in this study involved various data collection methods such as semi-structured interview, survey questionnaire, participants’ observation and documenting. By diagnosing the problems, involving eight SME owner managers and four accounting training providers, this study found that Malaysian SMEs still lack CS, in line with findings in the extant literature. This problem is further hampered by the lack of training in CS provided by the government. Based on this finding, this study developed a CS course, where the focus is on product and service costing. The cycle includes the process of developing the course based on SME owner-managers’ input (planning), conducting training for the SME owner-managers (acting), collecting feedback from the training participants (observing) and reflecting on the feedback to improve the course (reflecting). The product and service costing course went through three practical action research cycles with different participants. The course was then improved from one cycle to the next cycle. At the acting stage, thirty-two participants involved in the first training, twenty participants involved in the second training and fifteen participants involved in the third training. The product and service costing course has been given to the CEDI, UUM to be included in their future entrepreneurship training programmes.