At a recent seminar you attended, the invited speaker was discussing some of the advantages and disadvantages of standard costs in terms of evaluating performance and motivating goal-congruent behavior on the part of employees. One criticism of standard costs in particular caught your attention: The use of conventional standard costs may not provide appropriate incentives for improvements needed to compete effectively with world-class organizations. The speaker then discussed so-called continuous-improvement standard costs. Such standards embody systematically lower costs over time. For example, on a monthly basis, it might be appropriate to budget a 1.0% reduction in per-unit direct labor cost.

Assume that the standard wage rate into the foreseeable future is $30 per hour. Assume, too, that the budgeted labor-hour standard for October of the current year is 3.50 hours and that this standard is reduced each month by 1%. During December of the current year the company produced 5,600 units of XL-10, using 25,000 direct labor hours. The actual wage rate per hour in December was $32.00.

Required:

1. Prepare a table that contains the standard labor-hour requirement per unit and standard direct labor cost per unit for the 4 months, October through January.

Month	Standard Labor-Hour Requirement/Unit		Standard Direct Labor Cost/Unit
October		hr.per unit
November		hr.per unit
December		hr.per unit
January		hr.per unit

2) Compute the direct labor efficiency variance for December. Was this variance favorable (F) or unfavorable (U)? (Round your final answer to nearest whole dollar amount.)

Direct-labor efficiency variance