The Stewart Box Company
The Stewart Box Company is a profitable company with a functional structure in place as well as identified responsibility centers. The company has well established strategic planning, cost estimates and costing procedures. In an industry where competition is tight due to capacity requirements in manufacturing plants, the company was able to tap the market for custom- made carton boxes. However, its market is still limited to within the 500mile radius of its manufacturing site, thus 15% of the time the company has to under cost to be able to fulfil the volume requirements for its operation, and 65% of the time they are priced higher than their competitors. Furthermore, cost estimates established based on the previous year’s data were used to cost custom-made jobs which do not accurately capture actual costs spent for the job orders. To address these issues, the company has to put in place measures to encourage its sales force to tap other markets and new customers to fulfil volume requirements, as well as revalidate its costing procedures to include activity based costing, which will better capture costs spent on job orders, and ultimately improve the company’s bottom line.
CASE CONTENT
Stewart Box Company is a medium-sized packaging company that manufactures paperboard cartons and boxes. It is a profitable in its operation having distinguished itself from the competition by offering custom made boxes and delivering on time. The company is functionally structured with identified responsibility centers. However there are still areas for improvements such as in accounting, budgeting, planning, and pricing system.
Strengths and shortcomings were identified, and proposal on improvements were highlighted in the Analysis section of this report.
PROBLEM DEFINITION
In an industry where competition is tight for volume orders, Stewart Box Company has established its niche market in custom made boxes for his clients. However it has limited its market to within the 500 mile radius of his manufacturing plant resulting to underutilized capacity of his plant. Further, the job costing procedures in computing for job order costs are estimates based on the values from previous year but based on industry prices, his prices are higher 65% of the time.
THE FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS AND AREAS OF CONSIDERATION
Evaluation of the current structure, control systems and strategies to identify cause of the defined problem. Areas of consideration is the market penetration, capacity utilization and costing system.
The founhder of the company, Godfrey Keebler, started with jus a small bakery in Philadelphia, PA in 1853. During the next two generations, local bakeries popped up around the country, including Strietmann, Hekman, Supreme and Bowman. With the introduction of cars and trucks (carrying the Keebler logo), bakery goods could be distributed beyond the neighborhood and regional distribution began.
This company manufactures tables and cabinets to hold microwave ovens and portable televisions. Looking at the data, it is apparent that there are ways to make this company more efficient in their manufacturing processes while looking at the overtime hours involved in the operations. Most of this companies products follow the very same assembly and production lines with the difference being that the Saturn microwave stand and the Gemini TV stand both contain a part refered to as 3079 which requires a special lathe in the production phase. This lathe requires a highly train...
We have cumulated a profit of $206 million over this period, second of the industry. Our goal of escalating profit has advised us to increase automation level and for cutting costs, which enabled us to have the margins of all products above 30% in 2019 and an average margin of 53.4% in 2024. Additionally, we invested to keep our products updated to the market trend with an attention to customer buying criteria. Moreover, starting from recent years, we run our full capacity with second shifts whenever the market need has a possibility to accommodate our production. To achieve a greater profit, we based our pricing strategy on the market movements in general by decreasing our price by $0.50 every year except for our Low End product-Acre.
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The Jones Blair Company has increased sales on an annual basis, but the sales volume has stayed the same. This is due to the high cost of research and development in their products. The company is in fear of facing a plateau in price and being able stay competitive in the industry. Jones Blair needs to determine where and how the company will market its architectural products in the southern US.
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Signode Industries Inc. - Providing Packaging Solutions Executive Summary SIGNODE INDUSTRY: DILEMMA AT HAND: Mr. Gary Reed, President of Signode Industries packaging division, is in a dilemma as what he should be his course of action to meet the 6.8% increase in price of cold rolled steel- the raw material used in manufacture of Signode’s primary product, steel strapping. There are few options given in the case: Increase Signode’s strapping prices to offset the increased price of cold – rolled steel. Maintain Signode’s current book prices as increasing prices would affect sales force morale. Introduce price-flex model as proposed by Jack Davis i.e. a kind of selective discounting or premium charging for customized services. Recommendations Reason: (All data in accordance to 1983) In accordance to Exhibit 1: Sales of Packaging Division of the company = $285,950 In accordance to Table A: Sales of Apex = 33.3% of $285,950 Sales of BBM = 26.8% of $285,950 Sales of HDM = 33.4% of $285,950 Sales of Customized Products = 6.5% of $285,950 In accordance to Exhibit 4: Similarly, For Apex: As it has a capacity utilization of 71% now, Suppose a sale is $100. Then contribution is $39.15 Therefore variable cost is $60.85. Now if we increase the capacity utilization to 100%, Sales becomes $ 141 since production increases by [(100-71)/71] * 100 = 41% Variable Cost = 141% of 60.85 = $85.8 Fixed Cost = 69.38% * 12.3 = $8.53 Total Cost = 85.8+8.53 = $94.33 EBIT = Sales – Variable cost – Fixed Cost = $46.67 % of EBIT = [(46.67/141) * 100] = 33.09% Suppose the company sales 100x units, the total cost was 69.38. Thus per unit cost was .6938. Now the company sells 141x units, the total cost...
The contained paper has been prepared with objectives of elaborating over the three different costing methods namely, Absorption/Full Costing, Variable/Marginal Costing, and Activity Based accounting. The first segment of the report seeks to define and illustrate the costing methods based on the personal understanding of the writer gained through the class room and the academic readings. Part two of the report takes a form of short essay, written critically to evaluate the application of standard costing and variance analysis to any size of business, and concludes with a verdict that whether or not standard costing and variance analysis is applicable to each business with consideration of its costs and benefits of the system.
As such, there is material cost regulator, manufacturing control, labor cost regulator, excellence control and so on. Conversely, control over the price is implemented through the methods of financial control and typical costing (Meigs, 1998). The control methods aid the management in understanding the operating competence of a firm. Cost accounting also determines the selling price. The intention of all business firms is minimizing costs and maximizing profits. The costs incurred in producing goods and services may be reduced through incorporating alternate but cheaper resources of
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).
Weaknesses: The reliability of the information provided is limited as it is a blog entry. But there is still a reference list provided where it should looked at to ensure the
Hansen, D., Mowen, M., & Guan, L., Cost Management: Accounting & Control 6th ed., Mason, Ohio: South-Western
Job costing involves usage of situations where every job is done cost differently, consumers specifications play a bigger picture in this case. Direct and indirect costs are encountered. It is believed that job costing has lots of costs accrued from the production to the consumers (REEVE, J. M., WARREN, C. S., & DUCHAC, J. E. 2012). This involves labor, running of machines, and all the individuals who are involved in the production of a product from raw to the final product, indirect costs are applied in this order. Job costing order is best showcased in a manufacturing company, let’s take coca cola company, company specialized in beverages manufacturing and distribution, usually customers have no say in the final products of this company, but as the trends for consumption of a certain flavor, according to their statistics they will conform with the demands. The special requirements, like name branding on the bottles of the beverages, customization of the containers have had a significant impact in the consumption of coca cola products (Weygandt, J. J., Kieso, D. E., & Kimmel, P. D. 2010).
Activity-based costing (ABC) is a costing method that is designed to provide managers with cost information for strategic and other decisions that potentially affect capacity and therefore “fixed” as well as variable costs. Activity-based costing is mostly used for internal decision making and managing activities while traditional costing method is used to provide data for external financial reports. Most organization uses activity-based costing as an addition system for using traditional absorption costing as sometimes the traditional cost system misleads the product’s profitability. In a company, there are many products on sale, if one product is sold at a high price with low product margin and a product with high product margin at a low price, it may result in a loss. In addition, due to the reason that cost drivers and enterprises business may change, activity-based costing analysis also needs to be revised periodically. This amendment should be prompted to change pricing, product, customer focus and market share strategy to improve corporate profitability.