Heartland & Company Essay

The Home Depot (Ticker: HD) is the world’s largest home-improvement retailer along with being an American Fortune 50 company. The company operates 2,259 retail building supply/home improvement “warehouse” type stores all across the United States, Canada and Mexico. The Home Depot has over 340,000 team members and is based in Atlanta, Georgia. The average store size is just over 100,000 square feet along with an additional 24,000 square feet set aside for seasonal gardening.

The purpose of this business report is to gain familiarity with Wal-Mart and to learn about the different aspects that make Wal-Mart a successful company. This report gives an in-depth analysis of the company history, services and products provided, the company philosophy, business methods, organizational structure, and financial and competitive analysis.

Swisher Mower is a lawn and garden company that manufacturers lawn mowers in its plant in Warrensburg, Missouri. The company’s flagship product is the Ride King. In 1996, Swisher was approached by a national merchandise retailer offering to distribute Swisher’s standard mower under a private label. The retailer offered to distribute the product line, but included several stipulations that would change the Swisher’s distribution methods of its product. Sales within the industry are predominantly determined by changes within the economy. If the economy weakens, overall sales within the industry decrease. This cyclical effect can hinder or expand sales for a company, causing many companies to adjust their business strategies.

Wilkerson employs a Normal Cost System, which means that they use predetermined overhead rates along with actual costs for direct material and direct labor. Normal costing systems are appropriate when overhead costs are a relatively small percentage of total manufacturing costs and product diversity is limited. For Wilkerson, normal costing does not make sense. Overhead costs make up over 50 percent of total manufacturing costs and their product offering is relatively more diverse. This indicates that the current accounting system in place may be distorting costs significantly. Supporting data:

In order to meet customer demands for higher product quality, to comply with federally-mandated environmental regulations, and to reduce production costs, HCC must spend $2,000,000 within the next three years to upgrade equipment. The upgrade is expected to result in production efficiencies that will lower material and labor costs by reducing defective products, process waste, in-process inventory, and production man-hours through simplified work processes. It has been over a decade since significant modifications were made to the production facilities. Those changes were mostly technical in nature and did not substantially alter work processes or reduce overall employment. The average productivity gain in the industry for the past five years has been 3% per year. Financing for the loan to purchase the equipment

Answer: It seems like Bridgeton and its consultants assumed that the savings from outsourcing those two products would be 435% of the direct labor dollar cost for those products - calculated amount $53,496.

Lowe’s Companies, Inc. is the fourteenth largest retailer in America, and overall the world’s second largest home improvement retailer. They are the 108th ranked corporation on the Fortune 500 top corporations list. With an impressive in store stock of 40,000 home improvement items on hand, ranging from lumber to Home décor items, plus an additional 400,000 home improvement items available through a special order program. Lowe’s provides a onetime stop for all home improvement needs, for both the Do-It-Yourselfer, and the ever-expanding market of the Commercial Business Customer.

The release of 2014 financial statements by American Eagle Outfitters and The Buckle Company require analysis to determine the financial position of the respective companies. A decision between the two companies is needed to decide which company Baruch College Fund should invest in. Findings in our research shows that The Buckle Company beats American Eagle Outfitters in terms of the key performance indicators of return on assets, profit margin, and asset turnover ratio. This information reveals that The Buckle Company is the better company to invest in.

Littlefield Technologies (LT) has developed another DSS product. The new product is manufactured using the same process as the product in the assignment “Capacity Management at Littlefield Technologies” — neither the process sequence nor the process time distributions at each tool have changed. The LT factory began production by investing most of its cash into capacity and inventory. Specifically, on day 0, the factory began operations with three stuffers, two testers, and one tuner, and a raw materials inventory of 9600 kits. This left the factory with zero cash on hand. Customer demand

Going into 2004, Bob Moyer planned to produce 10,000 bicycles at Mile High Cycles. Construction of his bicycles includes the utilization of three departments, frames, wheel assembly, and final assembly. During this year, Mile High Cycles ended up actually producing 10,800 bicycles to meet higher than expected demand. Bob is curious as to whether or not he was successful in maintaining costs to meet these higher levels of demand.

Harnischfeger’s corporate recovery plan was a four pronged approach that involved (1) changes in top management, (2) cost reductions to lower the break-even point, (3) reorientation of the company’s business and (4) debt restructuring and recapitalization. These changes at first glance appear to have allowed Harnischfeger to improve its financial performance from a net loss of $3.49 per share in 1983 to a net gain of $1.28 per share in 1984. In addition, Harnischfeger has appeared to have achieved a majority of its desired outcomes from each of its four changes as shown below.

The change in the competitive environment greatly influenced JDCW. The early 70s were the end of the post WWII boom period, during which time JDCW was expanding its operations and operating many of its manufacturing plants at capacity. However, there were multiple economic factors in the early 80s that negatively affected the demand for JDCW products. The effect of these economic factors is evidenced in the case study by the fact that during the 1970s

John Deere Component Works (JDCW), subdivision of John Deere and Co. was in charged specifically of the manufacturing of tractor component parts. The demand for JDCW’s products had problems due to the collapse of farmland value and commodity prices. Numerous and constant failures in JDCW’s competition for bids, alerted top management to start questioning their current costing methods. As an outcome, the analysis has to be guided to research on the current costing methods with the intention of establishing legitimacy and to help the company in adopting a more appropriate costing system.

Weekly profits have increased from $37,800 to $45,690 when 10 units of light weight compressors are manufactured; clearly showing that it’s a financially better off move.

Heartland is a NYSE-listed company (HPY) and they employ approximately 4,000 people around the country. Heartland is also the founder of the Merchant Bill of Rights proposed by Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 that places a cap on interchange or transaction fees.