Increasing Company Profits
Fabricator Inc, a specializes in equipment manufacture, and uses a job order costing system. The overhead rate is now $3000 per direct labor hour. The design engineer does not understand how the accounting department comes up with this rate. He thinks it drives up the cost of the products being sold, and encourages the design engineers to use machine technology instead of direct labor. He says the there has been less and less direct labor over the past few years, but overhead continues to rise. He is also concerned about when errors in their estimate of assembly time. A thirty minute mistake can cost $1,500. He is concerned that the high overhead cost will cost the company its competitive edge. If the engineer could reviewing the manufacturing cost and the job ordering cost system with the accounting department it would probably address his concerns.
The manufacturing cost is determined by managerial accountants, they can provide useful cost information for manufacturing businesses. The manufacturing cost is determined by direct materials cost, direct labor cost, and factory overhead cost. Direct materials cost shows how much it cost to convert raw materials to a finished product. To qualify as direct material cost it has to be an important part of the finished product and a large portion of the total cost of the item. Direct labor cost is the cost of employee wages during the time to convert raw materials to a finished product. To qualify as direct labor cost it must also be an important part of the finished product and a large portion of the total cost of the item. Then the factory overhead is the indirect cost of the item. This can include utilities, equipment maintenance, property taxes of the b...
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...ng. When I comes to scheduling, quality, suppliers, and customers lean manufacturing has zero defects and emphasizes supply chain management. Where as, traditional manufacturing tolerates defects, and treats suppliers and customers as independent entities. Activity based costing will assign factory overhead more accurately. This would use the cost of the activity to determine the product cost. This is more cost effective than using a single plant wide overhead rate (Warren p 399).
Once the engineer goes to the accounting department and they explain to him why the overhead is increasing due to things such as utilities, employee wages, cost of material increase, etc.… He could then suggest lean manufacturing and activity based costing as a way of saving the company money and attracting more business. As we all know companies are in the business of maximizing profits.
Overhead based on direct labor includes the cost of the Product Development Support Center, interest expenses, and general and administrative expenses. The Product Development Support Center failed to account for hours spent on each product, which will not only complicate the product cost calculations, but also the calculation of capitalization expenses later on. The Development Support Center will be most used during the peak (i.e. most hours) time of development for each product, and hours worked will probably be the best way to divvy up the costs of the support center. The money invested in the company is being used on developing each product right now. I figured interest would best be divvied up by hours to attribute the interest expense to the product using the most of the investment. Similar to the reasons stated before general and administrative costs are going to be associated with the most prominent product, and that is best seen through hours. (Figure A)
The procedure of Lean Manufacturing has been the principle concerns and issues of numerous manufacturing companies all through the world. Numerous procedures paving the way to lean manufacturing have affected this significantly, for example, Interchangeable parts, Just in Time Production, the Ford Assembly line, and the Toyota Production Systems.
The method of Lean Six Sigma is the combination of two business techniques that includes Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma. Lean manufacturing focuses on improving the flow of the organization by training highly skilled employees to increase the overall speed while Six Sigma focuses on improving current performance and overall accuracy. In most cases, blending both Lean and Six Sigma can be costly; however the end result can have create an organization that focuses on quality, accuracy, and speed to meet the goal which is profitability.
The presentation of the material is in dollars only. Overhead is applied to products as a percent of direct labor dollar cost. Factory profit for each year is found by subtracting direct material, direct labor, and direct overhead costs from total sales. The overhead percentage is calculated at the same time budgeting and is applied as a single overhead pool throughout each model year. The consulting company used 435% of direct labor costs in 1987 for their study; the budgeted was actually 437% (OH/DL=107,954/24,682). A similar percentage applies in the following year (109890/25294=434.5%). However in the next two years, after the outsourcing of oil pans and mufflers was enacted, the allocation of overhead in...
In conclusion, “a study of the average benefits among US manufacturers over a five-year time frame revealed 90% reduction in cycle time, 70% reduction in inventory, 50% reduction in labor costs, and 80% reduction in space requirements” (Russell & Taylor, 2011, p. 740). There are many benefits to embracing Lean, and interest is
...hould be noted that the process of Lean management was first applied in the area of manufacturing. Some analysts tell that his particular business management process came out of the Toyota Company’s production system of cars. It should be noted that the Japanese are very much inclined to adopt anything that would reduce costs and eliminate wastes. Hence, it is no wonder that the Japanese are known for their simplicity and design and the minimalist view on things. However, nowadays has evolved from the area of manufacturing and could now be applied in the area of management. Before moving forward to the essential principles of Lean management, it would be better to clearly define it first. The said book by Bradley did not really give a definite and concise definition of Lean. Instead, he tried to define this said business management concept though examples.
An organization costing system is a system that helps the management with the strategy planning while the system plays an important role in providing accurate cost information about the products and customers (Curtin, 2006). UPS utilizes the Activity-Based Costing (ABC) system. ABC assumes that activities cause costs and that cost objects create the demand for activities (Marx, 2009). The key to cost allocation under ABC is to identify the activities that are performed to provide a particular service and then aggregate the costs of the activities (Gapenski, 2012). This is a marked departure from the practice of sharing overheads costs equally or overheads becoming part of the overall profit-loss estimate instead of component product pricing (Nayab, 2011).
The costing system is a system that is used throughout businesses that offer a service. “A standard costing system uses standard costs and quantities of all three types of manufacturing costs: direct materials, direct labor, and factory overhead” (Blocher 2016 p. 97). Companies utilize the costing system to monitor the actual product usage compared to prior usage. Contractor use this system when bidding on jobs; once they collect specific instruction for the requested job they factor in the amount of material, labor, and other overhead costs then provide a quote for the assignment. “Strategic cost management is deliberate decision-making aimed at aligning the firm's cost structure” (Anderson & Sedatole 2003). Red Lobster and Kroger are examples
Delta Air Lines is one of the biggest airlines in the world and continues to grow, due to the constant innovation they bring. Activity-based costing (ABC) systems have a two-stage procedure often used when companies are distributing overhead costs to the respective product or service. In the first step, the activities are described and the overhead costs are placed into cost pools. In the second step, the overhead costs are distributed to a product line from each cost pool (Hilton). In the figure below, you will see an example of the two stages of the ABC system.
Treating overhead costs as "fixed" can cause an unfair and highly misleading distribution of overhead costs which are in fact variable.
Firms today are trying to introduce activity-based costing into their system, however, some firms are unsuccessful in the implementation, which later result in abandoning the ABC system. According to research, the reason of failure ABC implementation in People’s Bank of China is due to lack of a clear business purpose about the implementation, lack of education about ABC, poor ABC model design, lack of participants, individual and organizational resistance to change, and few outsourcers available. To solve these problems, top management support and cross-functional involvem...
"Both methods estimate overhead costs related to production and then assign these costs to products based on a cost-driver rate. The differences are in the accuracy and complexity of the two methods" (1) , Now we will discuss why ABC can result in more reliable products costs than conventional labor based product costing system . In recent years, the nature of industrial production has fundamentally altered; we will discuss their characteristics. First we have machine production and capital intensive, Now machines are the main tool and at the heart of production; labors maintain machines and supervise them, and machines are the ones that dictates the pace and rate of production. The second characteristic is high level of overheads relative to direct cost; in modern businesses they tend to use overheads in different ways for example: some products need engineering time and some products require machine time so that products will use overheads differently. The third characteristic is highly competitive international market, transportation including fast freight and relatively cheap; one of the advantages is the use of internet ensures that customers can easily and quickly reach and find products and also cheaply, this environment is highly competitive so companies need to know accurately their range of prices in order to use this information to gain competitive advantage over other
Many companies, particularly those in the manufacturing industry mostly produce products following a forecasting on demand. Though from time to time it can make them on receiving orders from its clients. The items that are made and the work which is completed in accordance with the order of a customers is called job. Hence, the costing process intended to establish the cost of a job is extremely important. Job order costing therefore is the costing system which establishes the cost of the jobs obtained from a client (Walther, n.d.). In this way, job order costing approximations the costs of producing products in line with clients' instructions.
"College Accounting Coach." Process Costing-Definitions And Features(Part1) « Process Costing « Cost Accounting «. Feb. 2007. Web
Of greater importance, job-order costing system needs to accumulate three types of information which include direct materials, direct labor, and overhead. These factors are highly important essentially because of the significant variations in the products produced. Hence, each product or batch has a job identification number and costs are accumulated by a job number. All the more, job-order costing systems requires detailed accounting information and thus the total cost of all jobs is accumulated in one work-in process inventory control account; details of the cost materials, labor, and overhead for each job are kept in subsidiary records called job-order cost sheets (Edmonds, Tsay, & Olds,