Productivity and Quality

11. If 8,000 units are produced, what is the total amount of manufacturing overhead cost incurred to support this level of production? What is the total amount expressed on a per unit basis?

Overhead costs are not in proportion to the production output because of the method they are using. This leads to inaccurate pricing and costing decisions. An Activity Based Costing System would help find the real relationship between the products produced and overhead.

The current method of apportioning production overheads based on direct labour hours can be described as a traditional approach to product costing. In a manufacturing company’s financial statements, each item produced must be allocated some of the production overheads to make the statements compliant. Sometimes the individual costs of these items can be calculated incorrectly based on overall production overhead and the system of allocating in place, however the overall financial statement can still be accurate. This traditional method of allocating the production

The overhead spending is greater than the direct labour costs or the direct material costs for all three product lines- Valves, Pumps and Flow Controllers (Exhibit 2). Overheads are simply charged at 185% constant for three diverse products. The fact that there is huge variance in the number of units produced per production run- it is 375 for valves and 18 for flow controllers per production run. This shows the reason for high overheads cost too. Hence it calls for checking the cost allocation system of the company.

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

6. Other manufacturing overhead consisted of indirect materials $14,000, indirect labor $20,000, and depreciation on factory machinery $8,000.

3. Briefly describe how the current production cost assignment system works. What are the consumption ratios (activity percentages) for assigning manufacturing overhead to each product at present?

Allocating overhead costs is one of the important tasks and is necessary to be done by management accountant. One key reason is that in term of pricing strategies, many firms decide their products’ selling price based on their cost. And the selling price has to cover all the costs and profit.

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

Under the existing cost system for the turning machine area, there are two direct costs and three cost pools for overhead costs. The two direct costs are simply Direct Labor and Direct Material, which are traced to the cost object, which is Machine Parts. The total overhead is split into three cost pools, which are the following: overhead applied on direct labor, overhead applied on material dollars, and overhead applied on ACTS machine hours. Furthermore, each cost pool is broken down into direct and period sub categories. The mentioned cost pools for the following cost drivers: Direct Labor dollars, Material dollars, and machine hours.

3) Using the budget Data, what was the total expected cost per unit if all manufacturing and shipping overhead (both variable and fixed) were allocate to planned production? What was the actual cost per unit of production and shipping?

1. Use the Overhead Cost Activity Analysis in Exhibit 5 and other data on manufacturing

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

Company α wants to construct a cost volume relation between its factory overhead cost and number of units produced. Use the high-low method to analyze its factory overhead (FOH) costs and build a cost volume formula. The volume and the corresponding total cost information of the factory for past eight months are given below:

inventories of finished goods, or whether less was produced than sold, which would mean a