Walker Pen Company
Jane Dempsey, controller of the Walker Pen Company, was
concerned about the recent financial trends in operating results.
Walker Pen had been the low-cost producer of traditional BLUE pens
and BLACK pens. Profit margins were over 22% of sales.
Several years earlier Dennis Selmor, the sales manager, had
seen opportunities to expand the business by extending the product
line into new products that offered premium selling prices over
traditional BLUE and BLACK pens. Five years earlier, RED pens had
been introduced; they required the same basic production technology
but could be sold at a 3% premium. And last year, PURPLE pens had
been introduced because of the 8% premium in selling price they
could command.
But Dempsey had just seen the financial results (see Exhibit
1) for the most recent fiscal year and was keenly
disappointed.
The new RED and PURPLE pens do seem more profitable than our
BLUE and BLACK pens, but overall profitability is down, and even
the new products are not earning the margins we used to see from
our traditional products. Perhaps this is the tougher global
competition I have been reading about. At least the new line,
particularly PURPLE pens, is showing much higher margins. Perhaps
we should follow Dennis's advice and introduce even more specialty
colored pens. Dennis claims that consumers are willing to pay
higher prices for these specialty colors.
Jeffrey Donald, the manufacturing manager, was also reflecting
on the changed environment at the Walker Pen Company:
Five years ago, life was a lot simpler. We produced just BLUE
and BLACK pens in long production runs, and everything ran
smoothly, without much intervention. Difficulties started when the
RED pens were introduced and we had to make more changeovers. This
required us to stop production, empty the vats, clean out all
remnants of the previous color, and then start the production of
the red ink. Making black ink was simple; we didn't even have to
clean out the residual blue ink from the previous run if we just
dumped in enough black ink to cover it up. But for the RED pens,
even small traces of the blue or black ink created quality
problems. And the ink for the new PURPLE pens also has demanding
specifications, but not quite as demanding as for RED pens.
We seem to be spending a lot more time on purchasing and
scheduling activities and just keeping track of where we stand on
existing, backlogged, and future orders. The new computer system we
got last year helped a lot to reduce the confusion. But I am
concerned about rumors I keep hearing that even more new colors may
be introduced in the near future. I don't think we have any more
capability to handle additional confusion and complexity in our
operations.
Exhibit 1
Traditional Income Statement
Blue Black Red Purple Total
Sales $88,408 $64,328 $15,930 $1,674 $170,340
Material costs 29,298 21,318 5,040 468 $56,124
Direct labor 12,028 8,752 2,106 211 $23,097
Overhead @ 270% 32,476 23,630 5,686 570 $62,362
Total operating income $14,606 $10,628 $3,098 $425
$28,757
Return on sales 17% 17% 19% 25% 17%
Operations
The Walker Pen Company produces pens in a single factory. The
major task is preparing and mixing the ink for the
different-colored pens. The ink is inserted into the pens in a
semiautomated process. A final packing and shipping stage is
performed manually.
Each product has a bill of materials that identifies the
quantity and cost of direct materials required for the product. A
routing sheet identifies the sequence of operations required for
each operating step. This information is used to calculate the
labor expenses for each of the four products. All of the plant's
indirect expenses are aggregated at the plant level and allocated
to products on the basis of their direct labor content. Currently,
this overhead burden rate is 270% of direct labor cost. Most people
in the plant recalled that not too many years ago the overhead rate
was only 200%.
Activity-Based Costing
Jane Dempsey recently attended a seminar of her professional
organization in which a professor had talked about a new concept,
called activity-based costing (ABC). This concept seemed to address
many of the problems she had been seeing at the Walker Pen Company.
The speaker even used an example that seemed to capture Walker's
situation exactly.
The professor argued that overhead should not be viewed as a
cost or a burden to be allocated on top of direct labor. Rather,
the organization should focus on activities performed by the
indirect and support resource of the organization and try to link
the cost of performing these activities directly to the products
for which they were performed. Dempsey obtained several books and
articles on the subject and soon tried to put into practice the
message she had heard and read about.
Activity-Based Cost Analysis
Dempsey first identified six categories of support expenses
that were currently being allocated to pen production:
Expense Category Expense
Indirect labor $20,626
Fringe benefits 17,489
Computer systems 10,193
Machinery 7,396
Maintenance 4,437
Energy 2,221
Total $62,362
She determined that the fringe benefits were 40% of labor
expenses (both direct and indirect) and would thus represent just a
percentage markup to be applied on top of direct and indirect labor
charges.
Dempsey interviewed department heads in charge of indirect
labor and found that three main activities accounted for their
work. About 52% of indirect labor was involved in scheduling or
handling production runs. This proportion included scheduling
production orders; purchasing, preparing, and releasing materials
for the production run; performing a first-item inspection every
time the process was changed over, and some scrap loss at the
beginning of each run until the process settled down. Another 40%
of indirect labor was required just for the physical changeover
from one color pen to another.
The time to change over to BLACK pens was relatively short
(about 1.1 hour) since the previous color did not have to be
completely eliminated from the machinery. Other colors required
longer changeover times; RED pens required the most extensive
changeover to meet the demanding quality specification for this
color.
The remaining 8% of the time was spent maintaining records on
the four products, including the bill of materials and routing
information, monitoring and maintaining a minimum supply of raw
materials and finished goods inventory for each product, improving
the production processes, and performing engineering changes for
the products. Dempsey also collected information on potential
activity cost drivers for Walker's activities (see Exhibit 2) and
the distribution of the cost drivers for each of the four products.
Dempsey next turned her attention to the $10,193 of expenses to
operate the company's computer system. She interviewed the managers
of the Data Center and the Management Information System
departments and found that most of the computer's time (and
software expense) was used to schedule production runs in the
factory and to order and pay for the materials required in each
production run.
Because each production run was made for a particular
customer, the computer time required to prepare shipping documents
and to invoice and collect from a customer was also included in
this activity. In total, about 79% of the computer resource was
involved in the production run activity. Almost all of the
remaining computer expense (21%) was used to keep records on the
four products, including production process and associated
engineering change notice information.
The remaining three categories of overhead expense (machine
depreciation, machine maintenance, and the energy to operate the
machines) were incurred to supply machine capacity to produce the
pens. The machines had a practical capacity of 10,100 hours of
productive time that could be supplied to pen production.
Dempsey believed that she now had the information she needed
to estimate an activity-based cost model for the Walker Pen
Company.
Exhibit 2
Direct Costs and Activity Cost Drivers
Blue Black Red Purple Total
Production sales volume
(no. of units) 51,400 37,400 9,000 900 98,700
Unit selling price $1.72 $1.72 $1.77 $1.86
Materials/unit cost $0.57 $0.57 $0.56 $0.52
Direct labor hr/unit 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.02 1,974
Machine hour/unit 0.11 0.09 0.11 0.10 10,100
No. of production runs 53 41 41 11 146
Setup time/run (hours) 4.60 1.10 6.40 3.80
Total setup time (hours) 244 45 262 42 593
Number of products 1 1 1 1 4
Required:
1. Design an Excel model to estimate the costs for the four
pen products using an activity-based costing approach (provide a
unit cost per pen color).
2. Prepare a revised income statement with profit margin
calculations. The income statement should be modeled on Exhibit 1
and include cost by pen color and in total.
3. Write an Executive Memo to Jane Dempsey and Dennis Selmor
explaining the managerial implications from the revised cost
estimates.
4. Bonus Question: Why is it acceptable for the fringe
benefits associated with direct to be in the overhead cost pool
when using direct labor as the allocation base and it is not
acceptable for the fringe benefits associated with direct labor to
be in the overhead cost pool when using ABC?
Round total costs and driver amounts; use 2 decimal places for
activity rates and unit costs. After allocating costs, your total
overhead cost may have a rounding error of $6.
Hints:
1.) The cost of the blue pen using ABC is: $1.34
(rounded).
2.) The overhead cost pool for the ABC method totals
$53,123.
3.) When switching from the plant wide allocation of overhead
using direct labor as the allocation base to the ABC method, you
must assign to direct labor the fringe benefits associated with
direct labor and not maintain this portion of the fringe benefits
in the overhead cost pool.
4.) Production is one of four activities used in the
analysis.