Question

Jeri Cooper, the sales manager of Brunners Corporation, is getting worried. Her last three bids were...

Jeri Cooper, the sales manager of Brunners Corporation, is getting worried. Her last three bids were rejected in favor of a bid from a new competitor to the market. Now, she is putting together a bid for a potential new customer, and she wants to make sure the price is competitive, but still profitable. As the managerial accountant at Brunners, your job is to help Jeri prepare bids by providing the most accurate cost estimates.

Brunners is a plastic injection custom molding company, which advertises its highly automated process as keeping costs low. Currently, Brunners uses a traditional (plantwide) costing system, with overhead costs allocated based on total direct labor hours. Suspecting that their traditional costing system is partially to blame for their recent problems, Brunners has begun the process of implementing ABC. However, before this new company entered the market, Brunners had little need to review their processes. Jeri has very little understanding of accounting, and has asked if her recent unsuccessful bids were due to an inaccurate costing system, or because process inefficiencies have driven up costs.

In the ABC implementation process, Brunners Corporation has identified four activities. The ‘molding’ activity is a highly automated process, where a few workers oversee several machines as they process parts. This is a large cost pool, as it includes the depreciation on the building all the plastic injection molding machines (i.e., millions of dollars of property, plant, and equipment). In the ‘materials management’ activity, workers with specialized machine training prepare each machine for a new process or color (setups) by cleaning and changing the molds in the machines, and then refill the machines with plastic pellets (materials handling) as needed. In the ‘trimming’ process, workers trim extra plastic from the parts. This extra plastic normally snaps off as the parts come out of the mold, but often needs to be trimmed as the molds get worn or if the mold is not correctly installed in the machine. Finally, in the ‘inspection’ activity, inspectors randomly select and inspect parts to ensure compliance with the customer’s specifications.

Having determined four activities used at Brunners, the ABC implementation team has separated the plant’s total overhead costs into the activity cost pools (see Table 1). The next step in the ABC implementation process it to identify cost drivers for each activity. So far, they have identified cost drivers for each of the activities (see Table 1). This is still a work in progress, though, and they are still making adjustments.

The proposed job is somewhat different, requiring pieces in a variety of colors (see Table 2 for details on the proposed job). Historically, customer jobs have required only one or two setups. While Brunners has not needed to support these types of requests in the past, several of the past bids (all rejected) have had similar needs. The plant manager believes that these types of jobs will increase in the future. Proving that they can support these requests would result in new business in future years.

You’ve realized that you could provide value to Brunners in a several different ways. First, providing cost estimates from both the traditional process and the proposed ABC method could shed some light on the accuracy of the cost estimation process. Second, you can use activity based management to identify improvements that could be made to the production process (if any). Finally, with your knowledge of this job (and the market looking forward), you could provide some valuable input to the ABC implementation team.

Table 1: ABC activities, cost drivers, and cost pools

Activity

Activity cost driver

Total activity cost pool

Est. cost driver usage

Molding

Machine hours

$420,000

300,000

Materials management

Lbs of materials

180,000

120,000

Trimming

DLH (trimming)

250,000

10,000

Inspection

# of inspections

100,000

2,000

Table 2: Job proposal (resources)

Direct materials

$10,000

Direct labor (total cost)

$8,000

Direct labor hours (molding)

300

Direct labor hours (trimming)

500

Lbs of material

3,500

Number of setups

6

Number of inspections

15

Number of machine-hours

1000

Required:

Write a 1-2 page memo, as the accountant of Brunners Corp, addressed to Jeri Cooper describing your analysis and the outcomes. Make sure you respond to the following items:

1.   Provide a total cost estimate using the current traditional costing system, where overhead is allocated based on direct labor hours (Brunners expects to use a total of 40,000 direct labor hours this year).

2.   Provide a total cost estimate using the activity based costing system proposed by the ABC implementation team.

3.   Explain to Jeri which cost estimate would be more accurate, and why.

4.   Use activity based management to respond to Jeri’s question about potential cost inefficiencies.

5.   Evaluate the ABC system as it currently stands. Explain what change(s) you expect the ABC implementation team to make, and how that could affect your cost estimates.

Grading Rubric:

Item

Points

Traditional cost estimate:

POHR calculation

1

OH allocation

1

Total cost estimate

1

ABC cost estimate:

Activity OHRs

1

OH allocation

1

Total cost estimate

1

Analysis and ABMgmt

Selection of cost estimate

2

ABM recommendation(s)

2

ABC evaluation

2

OABC format

2

Flow/legibility

2

Appendix titles/formatting

2

Grammar and proofreading

2

Total Points

20

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Answer #1

Answer:

Answer 1 Current operating overhead Operating Overhead Direct labor hours Moldin Materials handling and setups $ Trimming Inspection 420,000 180,000 150,000 100,000 850,000 40,000 21.25 hour Job Direct labor hours 402 Direct Material Direct Labor Factory Overhead @21.25 per hour Total Cost 10,000 15,000 8,543 33,543 Answer 2 Total activity allocation base Activity allocation rate Activity Cost 300,000 Molding 420,000 1.40 Machine hours 120,000 Materials handling and setups 180,000 1.50 Lbs of materials 30,000 Trimming 150,000 5.00 DLH (trimming) 2,000 Inspection 100,000 50.00 # of inspections 850,000

Based on ABC information Job Direct Material 10,000 15,000 560 5,250 1,260 150 32,220 Direct Labor Molding Materials handling and setups Trimming Inspection Total Cost 3. Explain to Jeri which cost estimate would be more accurate, and why 4. Use your understanding of activity based management to respond to Jeris question about potential cost inefficiencies. Use your understanding of selecting allocation bases to identify possible change(s) to the cost drivers proposed by the ABC implementation system, and explain how that could affect your cost estimates Activity based costing gives better information than the plant wide rate based on volume-related measures because ABC associates the cost of the various activities that must be performed in order to make, sell, and provide services to customers. Resource consumption i.e. the incurrence of costs) is driven by the activities that are performed; assigning costs based on the consumption of these activities more appropriately (accurately) reflects the cost associated with each cost object. Activity based costing (ABC) gives improved information than the rate based on Direct Labor hours related measures because ABC associates the cost of the various activities to be performed in order to make, sell, and provide services to customers. Resource consumption (i.e. the incurrence of costs) is driven by the activities that are performed; assigning costs based on the consumption of these activities more appropriately (accurately) reflects the cost associated with each cost object. Resource costs are assigned to activities based on their use of those resources, and activity costs are reassigned to cost objects (outputs) based on the cost objects proportional use of those activities. ABC helps organizations to understand the activities and resources associated with cost objects. This allows for examination of a firms financial and operating data and enables the monitoring and analysis of performance metrics. The real value from activity-based costing projects is the ability to manage costs and report actionable information. Such information creates a huge level of awareness within an organization regarding cost drivers. This may lead to cost reduction with identifications of inefficiencies with specific focus on cost drivers.

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