Question

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	$	120.00		$	87.00
Direct materials per unit	$	65.20		$	51.00
Direct labor per unit	$	11.20		$	8.00
Direct labor-hours per unit		1.4	DLHs		1.0	DLHs
Estimated annual production and sales		30,000	units		65,000	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	$	2,033,000
Estimated total direct labor-hours		107,000	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)	$	631,300		42,000	65,000	107,000
Batch setups (setups)		876,000		410	320	730
Product sustaining (number of products)		460,000		1	1	2
Other		65,700		NA	NA	NA
Total manufacturing overhead cost	$	2,033,000

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