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 $29 per hour. Assume, too, that the budgeted labor-hour standard for October of the current year is 1.60 hours and that this standard is reduced each month by 5%. During December of the current year the company produced 9,800 units of XL-10, using 15,300 direct labor hours. The actual wage rate per hour in December was $33.00.

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.

2. Compute the direct labor efficiency variance for December. Was this variance favorable or unfavorable?