Assignment

Management control system (MCS) is the progression of assessing, observing and managing the units of the organization so that there is successful and efficient distribution and consumption of resources in order to achieve the predestined objectives by influencing people's behaviors. (Merchant and Van der Stede, 2007) (Aldónio Ferreira and David Otley, 2009). On the other hand, there are three major control problems that can arise in a company, namely, lack of direction, lack of motivation, and personnel limitations. Lack of direction is where the employees might not have the idea what is going on in the organization and do not actually understand the objective of the organization. Secondly, personnel limitation is where the employees are short of skills in achieving the company's goal. Last but not least, the motivation problem can arise when individual and organizations objectives are different (Merchant and Van der Stede, 2007).

Tully Sugar Ltd is an unlisted public company based in Australia that manufacture raw sugar from the mill of sugar canes. In the same way, it also has the three major control problems as mentioned above. First of all, lack of directions. Tully Sugar Ltd hired up to 100 seasonal and 200 full time workers. Many of the employees are lack of directions as 1/3 of them are actually seasonal workers that are hired during the production period of crushing season. The seasonal workers would not fully understand the goal of the company and will not have full commitment to the company. The seasonal workers working during this season might not come back the next season. Tully Sugar Ltd should hire an experienced supervisor to supervise the seasonal workers to minimise the gap between desired goals of the company and workers (Margaret Abernethya et al., 2010).

The personnel limitation on the other hand can improve or prevent the problems arised from lack of training, intelligence, stamina and experience (Merchant and Van der Stede, 2007). It can also motivate the employees. By providing training, it doesn't only overcome the personnel limitation; it can also provide cultural control as the employees are trained under experienced workers. This can thus motivate the employees to act in a certain way to achieve the goal of the company. Some employees of the Tully Sugar Ltd hold multiple skills, which are needed at different phases in the production cycle. Perhaps these employees are not specialised in any of the area and therefore might not standardize the process of the production. To improve this problem, the company needs to acquire a relative standard system to monitor the producing procedures (Teemu Malmi and David Brown, 2008)

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Motivation problem can also be found in Tully Sugar Ltd, it can be concluded that Tully Sugar Ltd is a very decentralisation company, which organised in functional departments and has seven departments managers managing different areas with approximately two hundred full time personnel. However, this can give arise to problems, for example, the conflicting of interest as the company is composed of seven different departments thus the departments will probably be lack of coherence within the company, and therefore the company may not achieve the goal as a whole. This can be improved by having intragroup meetings regularly in the organisation as to balance the interest among the departments (Teemu Malmi and David Brown, 2008).

The total production of raw sugar in Tully Sugar Ltd varies every year as it's affected by the amount of sugar cane accessible for milling, the content of sugar in the canes obtained, and the efficiency of the operation in extracting the sugar. The first step in producing raw sugar is to extract the sugar juice from the sugar canes. Sugar canes are the main ingredient in producing sugars and therefore it is playing a very important role in this case. Tully Sugar Ltd should have another source of sugar canes besides their own sugar cane farms in order to get a better quality sugar canes supplies. By getting sugar canes from a better quality supplier, they can improve their total production of raw sugar. Besides that, Tully Sugar Ltd can also ensure that their raw material supply will not be discontinued in order to continue their production line even there's an uncontrollable natural disaster by getting into contract with another supplier.

Responsibility centers are organization units that are managed by managers who are in charge