Choi Fung Hong Company Limited Essay

Develop and diagram an activity based cost model using the information in the case. Provide your best estimates about the cost and profitability of Wilkerson’s three product lines. What difference does your cost assignment have on reported product costs and profitability? What causes any shifts in cost and profitability?

Activity-based costing can be defined as the managers allocate costs depending on the quantity of resources a product or service consumed in the manufacture of goods and services. The activity based

By Thomas Ahrens (London School of Economics), and Christopher Chapman (University of Oxford), from The Contemporary Accounting Research Vol. 21 No. 2 (Summer 2004) pp. 271–301.

Day J. and Krakhmal V. (2006) fourth edition (2011), An introduction to accounting and finance in business, Milton Keynes, The Open University

Brewer, C. P., Garrison, H., R., & Noreen, W., E., (2005). Introduction to Managerial Accounting, 2nd Edition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Glaser Health Products of Ranier Falls, Georgia needs assistance in evaluating and classifying costs in order to implement an activity-based costing system. As stated in the case, these costs will be used for planning and control decisions rather than inventory valuation. The activity-based costing system will provide better allocation of Glaser’s overhead costs rather than a system to look at the cost drivers or the activities that their overhead costs comprise. Glaser’s general structure of an activity-based costing model should consist of cost

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Cost drivers can be identified for each activity or cost category based on observation, discussions with management, simulations and statistical studies. The key is to determine the behavior of indirect costs with respect to activity or resource usage in each activity center (Leslie, 2009). These efforts have identified the eight cost drivers shown in Table 3.

This paper provides a brief presentation of Activity-Based Costing methodology, how is used as well as its short comings.

3. Under the new activity-based costing (ABC) system, compute the indirect cost allocation rates for each of the three activities:

Hydrocolloid dressings have a huge market in Taiwan, and as most of people who have had serious acne know, nothing seems to work. People are willing to try all kinds of new medicine and products for the hoped effect.

For China, the company should first consider in building a strong brand in China. SK-II should be expressed clearly to target customers. Company then provides knowledge in using skin care up to six or eight steps. One more considering point is that there is high import duty. Thus, company should minimize the cost to make product profitable.

Activity-based management, activity-based costing and continuous improvement, all these help in the improvement of the efficiency in manufacturing, better control of overhead costs and the accurate costing of products. With this in mind, We disagree with the advice that Chuck Davis, the firm’s controller, gave Leonard Bryner. The traditional way of costing produce average costs that severely overstated or understated. Without the accurate costs, the firm would not be able to price properly their products and that would be damaging to the firm. With activity-based costing and management, all costs are accounted for with the help activity-drivers and overhead costs are decreased. In turn, the costs that the firm has for their products are more accurate and pricing is much easier.

C. T. Horngren, A. Bhimani, S. M. Datar, G. Foster (2005), 'Activity-Based Costing', Management and Cost Accounting (Prentice Hall Europe), 345-363

ABC refers to cost attribution to cost units on the basis of benefit received from indirect activities e.g. material ordering, material handling, machine setups, quality assuring, customer support services etc. For each such activity, it is necessary to identify a cost driver that causes incurrence of cost relating to that activity. For example, hours spent on testing for a quality assurance activity may be used as application base of cost driver for this activity.