CIMA case study papers – how to analyse the pre-seen material
SCS students will focus on a company called ADF (Anderson Dairy Farming), while those taking the MCS will look at mobile phone company Portaphone. You can find the official pre-seen […]
SCS students will focus on a company called ADF (Anderson Dairy Farming), while those taking the MCS will look at mobile phone company Portaphone.
You can find the official pre-seen materials from CIMA on the SCS November 2016 exam here, and for the MCS November 2016 exam here.
SCS Students – Anderson Dairy Farming
SCS students will be taking on the role of Senior Manager in the Anderson Dairy Farming Company (ADF). Therefore, the tasks and questions you will face will be of a strategic nature as opposed to the more operational and mid-managerial level perspective that you have done before.
First off we’d recommend going through the materials yourself, make notes and highlight the information that you think is most relevant to developing a strategic understanding of the business.
Ask yourself questions such as:
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the company in relation to their overall strategy?
- What markets are they operating?
- What customers are they targeting?
- What gives them their competitive advantage?
- What are their competitors doing?
- A great and simple model to use for this kind of analysis is the SWOT analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Once you’ve completed your own analysis, then it’s time to speak to an expert tutor, join a peer discussion group or engage in further discussion elsewhere to see what you may have missed. But make sure you spend some on it on your own first!
MCS students – Portafone
Portofone designs and manufactures mobile telephones and in your role as financial manager you will be required to get to grips with all functional areas of the business, and the bulk of work revolves around management accounting.
Understanding your role in the MCS exam is crucial as it will determine how you approach each question and you will need to cater your answers accordingly. You need to be talking about the right things in the right way – this is Management level now so you need to go beyond what you covered in your Operational paper last time around.
We’d recommend going through the material on your own first, highlighting what you think is the important and most pertinent information.
A more thorough analysis should be done separately next so you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of the company and understand their strategic objectives.
After this you should have a good idea of what types of questions could come up. If there is a significant weakness in the company i.e. they are not committing enough investment and time in marketing, then there will probably be a question on the marketing mix (and remember you will need to think about this from a Financial Manager point of view).
There are various useful resources online to assist with your analysis, and our tutors will also be able to advise on what sort of questions you might expect in an exam, based on their experience.
Do get in touch if you’d like some support.
