Question

Problem 7-17 Comparing Traditional and Activity-Based Product Margins [LO7-1, LO7-3, LO7-4, LO7-5]

Smoky Mountain Corporation makes two types of hiking boots—the Xtreme and the Pathfinder. Data concerning these two product lines appear below:

	Xtreme			Pathfinder
Selling price per unit	$	128.00		$	90.00
Direct materials per unit	$	63.10		$	50.00
Direct labor per unit	$	12.00		$	8.00
Direct labor-hours per unit		1.5	DLHs		1.0	DLHs
Estimated annual production and sales		20,000	units		70,000	units

The company has a traditional costing system in which manufacturing overhead is applied to units based on direct labor-hours. Data concerning manufacturing overhead and direct labor-hours for the upcoming year appear below:

Estimated total manufacturing overhead	$	2,100,000
Estimated total direct labor-hours		100,000	DLHs

Required:

1. Compute the product margins for the Xtreme and the Pathfinder products under the company’s traditional costing system.

2. The company is considering replacing its traditional costing system with an activity-based costing system that would assign its manufacturing overhead to the following four activity cost pools (the Other cost pool includes organization-sustaining costs and idle capacity costs):

	Estimated Overhead Cost			Expected Activity
Activities and Activity Measures				Xtreme	Pathfinder	Total
Supporting direct labor (direct labor-hours)	$	745,000		30,000	70,000	100,000
Batch setups (setups)		612,000		200	160	360
Product sustaining (number of products)		700,000		1	1	2
Other		43,000		NA	NA	NA
Total manufacturing overhead cost	$	2,100,000

Compute the product margins for the Xtreme and the Pathfinder products under the activity-based costing system.

3. Prepare a quantitative comparison of the traditional and activity-based cost assignments.

Answer 1