*** ACCA Paper APM June 2019 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Felt the same way

I truly hate this exam. When I opened the exam paper I was really happy because I had covered the topics and thought I had understood the scenarios quite well. However, I still found it so hard trying to understand some of the questions. I did keep reading them over and over again but was still not 100% clear what I needed to write in order to answer the questions…..

This is my second attempt and sadly I have a feeling I will have to keep retaking this exam no matter how hard I work?

I’m not happy ACCA!!!!

I hated Question 3b (13 marks)
I don’t get what the heck was going on after rereading the case 3 times, and I’m drowned by all the figures, relevant information and all the 100,000 items in a receipt 20X5, 20X6, 20% and x% labour 000s / hr

0 Marks or maybe 0.5 mark for putting the headings 20×5 20×6 Variance

Hello everyone,
I thought this paper was pretty well, I did following answers to questions if I correctly remember-:
Q1 (a) report to present KPIs for current CSFs and their connection with strategic objective of company
I divided the mission into two – three parts and then find the 2 recommended KPIs of those 3 CSFs and their connection with those parted mission objectives which were as follows
– To provide return to capital providers
For this part of objective the CSF was financial return which can measured through EPS and EVA or Market share
– To be world-class suppliers
For this part of objective the CSF was world-class software development team which can be measured through number of skilled staff worked efficiency and number of innovations through skilled staff.
– in its area of expert
For this part of objective the CSF was quality of imagine devices meet market standards which can be measured through customer satisfaction rate and customer survey by scoring rate system etc.

Q1(b) was about target costing
I calculated the target cost by taking profit margin of 20% on target price of $175 was gave $140.
For estimated cost we needed to calculate the price all costs per unit were added for inspection cost it was annually which needed to multiply by 2 years life of product hence it was divided by 250,000 for per unit,
There was rate of failure cost too which was 2.5% on each inspection cost and I took this rate on inspection per unit and added to all costs and got
Estimated cost of $161.25 or something I don’t remember! Also calculated 15. % cost gap related to target cost.
There was cost gap and needed to be closed even after product was redesigned! This means the inspection was still there even product was getting redesigned
Also told target costing benefit for the company and how it is calculated.

1(iii) this was about quality cost and which cost was responsible of external supplier (Xena) and what we were responsible for,
I wrote answer by telling there are two types of cost which are cost of non conformance and cost of conformance
Non-conformance are due to internal which are prevention and appraisal whereas conformance are due to external(means after production) which are internal and external failure costs.

Prevention , appraisal and external costs were responsible for the company as they have responsibility of delivering the product to customers whereas for internal failure costs the external supplier was responsible as product design was given to them by our company and hardware should of market standards before delivering it to customers.

1(iv) for this I wrote the external supplier wanted the information from our IS for financial purposes,
There are two sources of information which are external and internal
External information are not confidential but internal ones are
As our company was already sharing information of hardware design and other quality information with external supplier. By sharing financial information will affect on our capital providers as our company was already taking debts from venture capital
Leak of their information will effect on our financial sources and other information such as software will also can be copied and the external supplier can duplicate our software and make themselves the imagine devices as we were already sharing information with our supplier of hardware etc
This was the question 1 I could do

For Q2 (a) we needed to analyze the key characteristics which were perishable, heterogeneity, simultaneity and intangibility creating problems in measuring performance in respect to resource utilization and quality of service , it was pretty general knowledge in this part as e.g, dentist are our key resource but are intangible in nature hence it’s hard to measure their performance etc

For 2(b) the measures were already given and we needed to evaluate them and will they motivate our staff or not?
I wrote about dimensions connected with standards in reward criteria to achieve in order to achieve over all bonus of 2% up to 6% on salary if all of these are achieved and with their disadvantages on performance etc.

Now comes tricky question
3(a) was fair as we needed to find out which current budgeting was used and is it alright to move to ABB,
I wrote the current budgeting was used was incremental one as in 18 years there were only 10 stores of CRC and was steady but now there is rapid development as each year there are 4 stores being opened and currently huge store opening outside of town
This means large amount of activities are now being used and creates costs

There was also in deliver and out deliver items etc

ABB will be useful in this environment as it will also remove unwanted activities such as RFID which was introduced and couldn’t understood by staffs and still manual work was done by staffs etc

ABB is also helpful in keeping activities which are most valued by our customers high are ranked higher in budget to lookafter etc.

For 3(b) we needed to complete the analyst work which was the leased RFID in deliver items ( something it was called) and its actual costs was given
I calculated that part only and got adverse something like that , got not enough time on it though

So wrote the theory for variances and their usefulness for the business as it improves and measured the performance etc around 7 points I could write.

That’s all I could do in my skills for this paper

Hope everyone passes with flying colors and may God bless everyone with passes 🙂 !

@danbird13 said:
Did anyone recommend additional rewards on question 2, such as rewards linked to competitiveness, flexibility etc?

Did people use the service characteristics as headings on 2a or the measurement problems? Found myself switching between the two

Need a miracle as i got 0 on 3b :/

Yes I recommended alternative reward criteria (mostly tweaking what was already there). eg, their average was 10%for the failures in quality, so reducing this to say 8% would be better as it should improve quality rather than maintain it.

I also used the characteristics as the headings for each and commented on the +ve and -ve for each

Does anyone read past exam of any year with ABB. I don’t think such question would be in the history of ACCA. The examiner just wanted to surprise candidates…..

Not relating to the exams, but I want to hear from you guys, about APM as an option paper. I am not in an audit field, therefore I think the best option would be AFM and APM for me. However, I have had many negative comments about this paper. I have been advised to for AAA instead of APM. What would guys be suggesting? Thanks in advance

@opentuition_team said:
How was your APM exam? Please post your comments below, and vote in the Instant Poll

I felt the building block question was a bit left field, quite a small area to build 25% of the marks on. I had noticed in previous papers the Pyramid was given for a similar question, but not in this case. These exams will always be challenging so you just have to give it your best effort.

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[crowdsignal poll=10336117]

I received email from ACCA to complete a survey on June 2019 exam.

And I told whoever is concern to refer to this APM Poll especially Question 3b, however how serious will surveyor take candidates feedback is a different stories.

APM is not a straight forward test to the syllabus, so candidates really need time to plan how to address to the question requirments and generating ideas to the case scenarios under 3.15 Hours. We spent time studied so hard on the syllabus apart from our day job and a nasty Question such as 3b can messed up alot of people’s effort preparing for this.

Question 1d

I wrote about the problems with only using financial information?

Is this correct?

I can’t remember if it was a subsidiary or part of a strategic alliance the relationship between the companies but i wrote that through the other company only using financial data it would be difficult manage the quality as:

-Financial data doesn’t reflect the full picture of the quality of the goods produced

-Difficult to project how the quality of the goods will be maintained in the future as non financial factors cannot be considered such as employee satisfaction and morale

-Using the financial data would be backward looking, making it difficulty to manage future quality

This is my final exam and I haven’t failed one yet but think I’ve tripped up on this one.

Any suggestion on the marks for this type of answer? Thanks