Management Science

B. 1. The impact of costs on the decision to move forward with the new Maui Sandal line is as follows: As the production continues, the hours needed for each batch, or individual pair, will begin to decrease. By continuing to produce this line the total labor costs will continue to decrease, but most likely, at a slower rate as more sandals are produced. This data can help the company decide employment levels, capacity, costs, and their pricing of this particular merchandise in the open market. The company predicts that it will take 1,000 labor hours for production to complete for the first batch, with 50 total batches between month 1 and month 4.

14. A decision to work closely with a limited number of suppliers for the purpose of ensuring that the proper materials are available at the optimal time is an example of:

Mendel Paper Company has been doing relatively well with the sales of computer paper, napkins, place mats, and poster board. With more people eating out, the demand for napkins and place mats have increased. Computer paper and poster boards have slowly increased in demand as well. However, there is concern at the company with the fixed cost of operations. Marlene Herbert, the plant superintendent, said, “As we have automated our operation, we have experienced increases in fixed overhead and even variable overhead. And, we will have to add more equipment since it appears that we need even more plant capacity. We are operating over our normal capacity as it is.” (Case 2B). With the new production costs added in, will

We decided to decrease the price of mountain bike production from $134 per bike to $108. The difference of $26 for 11,000 units results in a saving of almost $300,000. In the meanwhile, we also decided to dump our finish goods inventory, incurring a loss of $175,000. We decided to increase our capacity from 20,000 to 27,500 and efficiency from 1,000,000 to 2,000,000. We want to avoid increasing capacity significantly in order to avoid low efficiency. At the same time we want to keep our wastage at a minimum. We reduced our retail margin for the bike and sports store to 20% while reducing the discount stores to 27%. These new retail margins

As you can see by the chart if the company were to produce an additional unit after 8 it would mean the marginal cost would be more than the marginal revenue causing the company to be losing money. Looking at it from total revenue to total cost point of the view; the profit from 8 widgets is $540 but if you produce one more is drops to $520, so again this shows where the company has hit their profit maximization mark.

net operating income will tend to move up and down in response to changes in levels of production.

In the case of Mendel Paper Company which produces four basic paper products lines at one of its plants: computer paper, napkins, place mats, and poster board. Although the plant superintendent, Marlene Herbert is pleases with increased sales he is also concerned about the costs. The superintendent is concerned with the high fixed cost of production, the increases in fixed overhead and even variable overhead. He feels that the production of place mat should be discontinued. His reason for the discontinuation is that the special printing is driving up the variable overhead to the point where the company may not find it profitable to continue with the line. After reviewing the future predictions of the

Rob’s goal is to keep margins consistent. As an example, he explained that if a customer wanted to upgrade from 10 seats to 30, an additional $200 in manufacturing costs would be added to

As will be seen below, the cost to manufacture a single unit of the architectural windows is much greater than the standard window (note the negative contribution margin of the architectural windows). This is contrary to the volume-based method where standard windows were more expensive. Under ABC, It makes sense that the architectural window is more expensive as it is generally more labor-intensive, requires more direct material and consumes more fixed resources than its standard window counterpart. ABC is able to capture these costs by tracing the activities to the correct product. The following section will analyze the individual components of the income statement in further detail. What is realized is that cost information is severely distorted under volume-based allocation approach, leading Doug to make uninformed decisions. As it currently stands, architectural windows would be unable to bring the Texas plant into a profitable position.

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.

9. (Ignore income taxes in this problem.) The Crawford Company is pondering an investment in a machine that

The true variable costs to Beauregard Textiles include the Direct Labor, Material, Material Spoilage, and Direct Department Expense. By excluding those expenses not related to the production of T-30, we can calculate the contribution margin for Beauregard using unit sales price and unit variable cost. Contribution margin is a measurement of the profitability of a product and is an excellent management tool to help determine whether to keep or drop certain aspects of the business. A positive contribution margin means that the company should produce the product, a negative contribution margin means the company is likely to suffer from every unit it produces.

5. (TCO 1) For each of the following activities, identify an appropriate activity-cost driver. a. machine maintenance b. machine setup c. quality control d. material ordering e. production scheduling f. warehouse expense g. engineering design

The above graph suggests that volume based computation of overhead costs does not reflect the real overhead costs based on actual production per product line (computed maximum in excess over actual). On the other hand, if we follow the allocation of overhead costs based on prime costs as illustrated in Exhibit 2 of the case, we need to consider other quantitative factors: 1. No data is available to determine the amount of raw materials used in producing each of the products. While we can assume that the production of small, colored glass ornaments uses fewer raw materials (e.g. glass) than large, colored glass ornaments, the amount of glass used to produce specialty ornaments cannot be derived from the facts of the case. 2. There is also no data available to determine the number of direct labor hours consumed for producing each product type, although evidently, specialty ornaments use more direct labor hours. Based on the above considerations, we deem it inaccurate to base overhead on prime costs, a common practice in traditional costing. In addition,

When sales volume increases, Company X will have a higher percentage increase in profit than Company Y. Company X's higher proportion of fixed costs gives the firm a higher operating leverage factor. The company's percentage increase in profit can be found by multiplying the percentage increase in sales volume by the firm's operating leverage factor. The sales mix of a multiproduct organization is the relative proportion of sales of its products. The weighted-average unit contribution margin is the average of the unit contribution margins for a firm's several products, with each product's contribution margin weighted by the relative proportion of that product's sales.