Cost and Flow Controllers

In using the ABC system, Valves and Pumps are matching the company’s target of 35% of gross margin apart from Flow Controllers. With the use of TAC, the gross margin on pump sales is 19.5% that well below the company's target gross margin of 35%. This indicates that the current overhead cost allocation practice did not reflect the real costs incurred on the products. The lower actual gross profit obtained was mainly due to wrong cost allocation on the pump product.

Wilkerson’s competitors have cut prices on their pumps, in order to maintain market share, Wilkerson also cut the price of their pumps. This dropped Wilkerson’s GM by about 15%. At the same time, Wilkerson was able to increase the price of their flow controllers by 10% without a drop in demand.

After Glaser management has identified the handful of the activities that connect overhead expenses to products, they must use the appropriate measure (the cost driver) to tie the overhead expenses to the product lines or service lines. To achieve this management must specify an appropriate cost driver for tracing costs associated with the various levels of activities to the next cost objective or products. The cost drivers can include a number of things such as direct labor hours, number of batches, or number of employees. (Appendix C shows the appropriate cost driver with the various levels of activities).

Company Wide Overhead Rate equal Forecast Overhead divided by Expected Machine Hours Overhead Rate equal $480,000 equal $6 per machine hour 80,000. Company Wide Rate: Direct Material Costs x Batch Size plus Direct Labor Costs x Batch Size Maxiflow: Alaska: 135 x 20 equal 2700 110 x 20 equal 2200 75 x 20 equal 1500 95 x 20 equal 1900 equal $4200 per batch equal $4100 per batch Departmental Rate. Direct Materials Costs plus Direct Labor Costs divided by Each Department Hour Maxiflow: 135 plus 75 equal $210 Radiator Parts Fabrication: 210 divided by 28 equal $7.50 per batch Radiator Assembly, Weld, and Test equal 210 divided by 30 equal $7 per batch Compressor Parts Fabrication: 210 divided by 32 equal $6.60 per batch Compressor Assembly and Test: 210 divided by 26 equal $8.10 per batch Alaska: 110 plus 95 equal 205 Radiator Parts Fabrication: 205 divided by 16 equal $12.80 per batch Radiator Assembly, Weld, and Test: 205 divided by 74 equal $2.70 per batch Compressor Parts Fabrication: 205 divided by 8 equal $25.60 per batch Compressor Assembly and Test: 205 divided by 66 equal $3.10 per batch. There was only a $100 difference between Maxiflow and Alaska when it came to company-wide rates per batch.

Under an ABC system, the allocation of costs to products is achieved through at least four analytical steps. Firstly, costs are grouped into activity levels. Secondly, cost drivers are

* The Pumps total product variable costs are $406,250, the Pumps total fixed costs are $316,501.94 and the Activity Based Costing Pumps cost per unit it $58.

1. What is the competitive situation faced by Wilkerson? The critical product in term of market competition is the pumps of Wilkerson Company. The pumps are Wilkersons major product line with a production of about 12,500 units per month. Pumps currently have the lowest gross margin among all products, because competitors had been reducing prices on pumps and Wilkerson adopted its prices in order to remain competitive and to maintain the volume. 2. Given some apparent problems with Wilkersons cost system, should executives abandon overhead assignment to products entirely by adopting a contribution margin approach in which manufacturing overhead is treated as a period expense? Our conclusion is, that they should not adopt

The above cost system was efficient during the 1980s because it split up overhead over three cost pools, adding an additional pool, which has machine hours as its cost driver. This proved efficient because “[w]ith increased usage of automated machines, direct labor run time no longer reflected the amount of processing being performed on parts, particularly when one operator was responsible for several machines.” Packet, pg. 7.

The valves that the company makes are produced using four different machine components and are produced and shipped in large lots. Scott feels as if the competitors are now able to match their quality but have yet to try and gain market share by cutting the prices of their valves. Additionally, the pumps are made using five components from machines and then assembled into the final product. These are then shipping to the industrial companies that have purchased these pumps. One issue is that competitors keep lowering their prices on their own pumps, so Wilkerson has to match these and lower their prices as well. This makes it hard for Wilkerson to keep their gross margin profits up since their prices continue to lower. Last, the flow controllers need more labor and machining components than either the pumps or the valves. Additionally, there are many other alternatives that are used in the industry so more product runs are needed for these versus the pumps or valves. Also, more shipments are needed for these since there are shipped to industrial companies. The flow controllers were doing better than the valves or the pumps since Wilkerson was able to raise their

First, we need to calculate employee’s working time per year, employees work for 42-2=40 hours per 5-day week. 40 hours times 52 weeks plus 8 hours for an additional day equals to 2088 hours, minus 14 days off work, the total work time is 1976 hours or 118,560 minutes. This number can be used to calculate the cost per minute of all types of staff except

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.

Based on the real world functioning of businesses, every organization that deals with the process of manufacturing of certain products operates in accordance with the main principle of maximizing its profits. During the performance of daily activities, many business managers face a series of questions related to planning, control and decision making. In order to give answers to all these questions, an additional analysis needs to be considered. It is very important for managers to plan carefully how they are going to generate sufficient money to pay down costs and, in this way to result with a profit. As managers are interested in having the adequate information about the influence that certain actions might have on the profitability of the business, "Cost Volume and Profit" analysis plays a significant role by being a potential tool in facilitating the process of making the right decisions regarding planning and control in order to add value to the company. (Trifan and Anton, 2011). To further illustrate the essential impact that CVP analysis has on management authorities in making better decisions, I will refer to and analyze the case of the Hampshire Company which follows as below.

Assigning the overhead costs to the products shows how profitable the products are after deducting all cost. However, it is important to find the appropriate method of overhead cost allocation. In Sippican’s case the traditional accounting method is used, which does not reflect the real resource usage of the different product lines. The correct method in this case would be to apply the time-driven ABC approach for cost allocation. Such method apart from showing the actual profitability after all cost deductions also depicts the differences in resource usage rates between the products and, thus, allows for identification of cost drivers. A contribution margin

The major problem faced by Destin is that pumps are losing profits due to intense price competition. Destin was forced to match the continuously reduced price from its competitors despite of the high production costs. As a result, the gross margins in the latest month have fallen from 35% to 22%. The reason why the company has been stuck in such difficulty, as Peggy pointed out in the meeting, is primarily because its competitors might be using a revised costing system while Destin is still using the traditional one.

The materials used per unit of production, the Run labor hours and machine hours are provided in exhibit 2. The overhead expenses per unit of the product have been apportioned according to their percentage production and usage.