Your feedback helps us continue to improve Garrison/Noreen/Brewer. In response to faculty suggestions we have added:

• Research and Application Cases using 10-K data from companies such as Whole Foods market, Dell, FedEx, and Target that offer end-of-chapter learning opportunities for students to identify strategy and business risks and evaluate managerial accounting concepts within a real-world context.
• New In Business boxes that contain relevant insights gleaned from the business press. As always, we fine-tuned the text with the objective of making it as userfriendly as possible.
• More questions and worked out solutions to the test bank. All items have been mapped to AACSB-AICPA standards.

In addition, seasoned users will notice a number of major changes in this edition, including the elimination of one chapter—the old chapter on service department costing that has been simplified and split up into two appendices. The major changes in this edition include:

• Chapter 1: New sections on strategy, Lean Production, the lean thinking model, Six Sigma, technology in business, enterprise systems, corporate governance, Sarbanes-Oxley, and enterprise risk management have been added.
• Chapter 4: Coverage of both the weighted-average and FIFO methods has been revised, eliminating the production report and simplifying the procedure for assigning costs to units. Material on the direct method and step-down methods has been included as an appendix to this chapter.
• Chapter 8: This chapter has been extensively rewritten— particularly the sections dealing with the determination of product and customer margins. A new appendix that covers activity-based costing as an alternative to traditional product costing for external reports has been added.
• Chapter 9: In the cash budget, the nature of the loans taken out to maintain minimum ending cash balances has been simplified. This significantly reduced the complexity of determining loan repayments and interest accruals.
• Chapter 12: The material covering service department charges has been simplified and included as an appendix to this chapter.
• Chapter 14: Treatment of the simple rate of return has been simplified. The procedures for computation of the payback period with uneven cash flows have been clarified.
• Chapter 16: The procedures used to calculate ratios have been standardized.