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Tankmaster Manufacturing Company Essay

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The Tankmaster Manufacturing Company, a large manufacturer of domestic oil tanks, is located in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. Since it came into existence in 1970, the company has enjoyed steady growth in both sales and profits.
Davina Tankmaster, the founder’s daughter, joined the company in 2005 after graduating with a degree in Accounting and Finance from Manchester University. One of her first tasks was to revise the costing system, as there was a need for more accurate product cost information to support the company’s strategy of offering keen prices in a highly competitive market dominated by a few large firms.
Davina had faced considerable opposition to the changes she had suggested, with several managers being willing to accept the …show more content…

Davina asks the production manager about the rise in overhead costs, causing him to virtually explode: “How can I keep costs down when marketing ignore our standard specifications and insist on 23 different versions of every product? I need more specialist engineers to monitor the changes, and they don’t come cheap. Also there are completely new parts coming through from design with huge material costs; materials handling is a real headache. And the number of specials going through on small production runs continues to increase. I need many more set-ups per shift and that is skilled work, but you can’t pick up that sort of skilled labour easily, so overtime is through the roof.”
Davina talks to the marketing manager next: “We are facing fierce competition for our bread-and-butter, high-volume lines and we just can’t match the low prices in the market. However, we have successfully increased our sales of the more specialised tanks despite an increase in prices forced on us by production. So we are meeting our overall sales targets and we encourage this trend towards the higher margin specialist products, our profits will rise. I don’t see any problem here at present, but there will be if you don’t make production get control of the cost increases.”
Davina starts to pull the information together, and gets frustrated at the

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