Blue Ridge Manufacturing Company

4. Distributing services using activity based costing reveals that Customer A is a highly more profitable consumer to Western than Customer B, despite identical net sales (see attached). Customer A uses less storage, delivery services, has fewer requisitions and a smaller inventory balance, making them a more inexpensive customer to service, in comparison to Customer B.

Under an ABC system, the allocation of costs to products is achieved through at least four analytical steps. Firstly, costs are grouped into activity levels. Secondly, cost drivers are

On the other hand one single employee can take care of Large corporations an professional users . (One single person can be responsible of 90% of the companie’s revenue) So , we have two solutions : first , to find the best employee and put him in charge of the professional users and large corporate accounts and use the other 9 employees to cover DIYs . The second solution is to make a cost-benefit analysis to determine if having 9 employees that generate only 10% of the companie’s revenue is profitable (Pareto principle) . So , we think that the company should let go to the DIYs clients and maybe use this employees to find new bigger customers. On this manner, the company would focuss only in professional users and large corporate accounts , this would generate much more profit and reduce cost of unnecessary employees and time.

The operation manager for JBI suggested considering that Saver Superstore is an easy to deal with partner unlike some other customers that make the business spent a lot of time on their rush orders .This comment brought Johnson to wonder about the customer service costs structure and allocation system. The current system allocates these costs based the revenue generated by each customer which assign a large share to Saver Superstore the biggest one.

One of the best aspects of the way the time-driven ABC system was put into place at Kemps was how efficiently and accurately management determined the main issues with the current cost system and responded with appropriate and relevant solutions. For example, one of the greatest problems the company was facing was that many of its operating costs were spread out equally over a customer base that was growing more diverse and demanding more personalized and varied service, effectively cutting or potentially eliminating entirely Kemps’ profit margins for a product. Therefore,

Blue Ridge’s competitive strategy appears to be cost leadership, focusing on a narrow product type and offering for sale only in the southeastern states. Blue Ridge’s limited offering of products, only a sports towel for limited use and distribution, give it an edge in determination as there are only so many materials, designs, and processes required for this one type of product. Though Blue Ridge does focus on just the sports towel, there are still some aspect of differentiation which causes the firm’s competitive strategy to also deviate a bit towards product differentiation. Blue Ridge offers variations of its sports towels aside from its three customary sizes (regular, hand, and midrange),

8. Using the ABC data, compute the average contribution to profit per account for both retail and business customers. What business strategy would be a manager using the ABC cost system likely adopt? How does this result compare to your response to Requirement 1, Part E?

Lastly, the just-in-time (JIT) approach is an operating philosophy that requires that all resources, including materials, personnel, and facilities, be acquired and used only as needed (Mazumder, 2007). The JIT approach works great for manufacturing companies because of their common classes of material that they use which are raw materials, work-in-process, and finished goods (Mazumber, 2007). According to JIT concept raw materials are received just in time to go into production, manufactured parts are completed just in time to be assembled into products, and products are completed just in time to be shipped to customers (Mazumber, 2007). The

The Bandon Group has identified several specific sets of information needs. First they must have the ability to analyze existing customer accounts for profitability. The have a need to understand which account they are making money off of and which account represent high volume profits. Second, they must have an effective sales prospecting system. The ability to measure the

Another significant result we can see is from the Current accounts and Credit Card Segments shown in Figure 4. As we can see here, 75% of the customers are responsible for generating 130% of the profit and the rest are

3. Which is the most attractive customer segment for MBC to target? Explain your reasoning.

Nowadays, we know that activity based costing system assigns overhead costs to products or services products that using a two-stage process, which focuses on activities. ABC is a relatively new and very important topic in managerial accounting. ABC allows us to find a way that we could determine the profitability of every product, profitability of every customer we serve, and the profitability of our process. Contents in brief, first that comparing potential advantages of ABC versus traditional costing methods. The

Under a traditional system, overhead cost is allocated to an activity based on hours or rates for direct labor or machine usage. However, this approach does not clearly indicate how much overhead cost will be needed in order to complete a job through a particular function. ABC methodology is to be used as an alternative to traditional accounting where a business 's overhead costs (indirect costs such as electrical energy consumption for heating or cooling, or indirect cost associated with marketing) are allocated as a proportion of direct costs, to an activity. This approach is unsatisfactory because there can be cases where two activities could absorb the same direct costs

Gainesboro Corporation was founded in 1923 by two mechanical engineers, James Gaines and David Scarboro. It was the industry leader in press and mould manufacturing. Its revenues declined from $911 million in 1998 to $757 million in 2004. To combat the decline in revenues and weakening profit margin it followed a two prong approach. First it devoted a greater share of its research and development budget to CAD/CAM to establish its industry leadership. Second the company underwent two major restructuring. The company had set the objective of achieving 15% CAGR growth.

After analyzing the costs function wise the firm should analyze the costs by each marketing entity – each product, each territory etc. For this purpose, the firm must put in place an accounting system that facilitates the assignment of functional expenses to the various entities like products, markets and customers.