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Case 2 Greetings Inc. Greetings Inc.: Activity-Based Costing Developed by Thomas L. Zeller, Lovola University Chicago, and Paul D. Kimmel, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee The Business Situation Mr. Burns, president of Greetings Inc., created the Wall Decor unit of Greetings three years ago to increase the company's revenue and profits. Unfortunately, even though Wall Decor's revenues have grown quickly, Greetings appears to be losing money on Wall Decor Mr. Burns has hired you to provide consulting services to Wall Decor's management. Your assignment is to make Wall Decor a profitable business unit Your first step is to talk with the Wall Decor work force. From your conver sations with store managers you learn that the individual Greetings stores are very happy with the Wall Decor arrangement. The stores are generating additional sales revenue from the sale of unframed and framed prints. They are especially enthusiastic about this revenue source because the online nature of the product enables them to generate revenue without the additional cost of carrying inven tory, Wall Decor sells unframed and framed prints to each store at product cost plus 20%. A 20% markup on products is a standard policy of all Greetings inter company transactions. Each store is allowed to add an additional markup to the unframed and framed print items according to market pressures. That is, the sell ing price charged by each store for unframed and framed prints is determined by each store manager. This policy ensures competitive pricing in the respective store locations, an important business issue because of the intense mall competition While the store managers are generally happy with the Wall Decor products, they have noted a significant difference in the sales performance of the unframed prints and the framed prints. They find it difficult to sell unframed prints at a competitive price. The price competition in the malls is very intense. On average stores find that the profits on unframed prints are very low because the cost for unframed prints charged by Wall Decor to the Greetings stores is only slightly below what competing stores charge their customers for unframed prints. As a result, the profit margin on unframed prints is very low, and the overall profit camned is small, even with the large volume of prints sold. In contrast, stores make a very good profit on framed prints and still beat the nearest competitor's price by about 15%. That is, the mall competitors cannot meet at a competi- tive price the quality of framed prints provided by the Greetings stores. As a re- sult, store managers advertise the lowest prices in town for high-quality framed prints. One store manager referred to Wall Decor's computer on the counter as a "cash machine for framed prints and a "lemonade stand for unframed prints. In a conversation with the production manager, you learned that she believes that the relative profitability of framed and unframed prints is distorted because CA-6 case 2 Cases for Management Decision-Making Greetings CA-7 of improper product costing. She feels that the costs provided by the company's traditional job order costing system are inaccurate. From the very beginning, she has carefully managed production and distribution costs. She explains, "Wall Dcor is essentially giving away expensive framed prints, and it appears that it is charging the stores too much for unframed prints. In her office she shows you her own product casting system, which supports her point of view. Your tour of the information technology (IT) department provided additional insight as to why Wall Decor is having financial problems. You discovered that to keep the website running requires separate computer servers and several infor mation technology professionals. Two separate activities are occurring in the technology area. First, purchasing professionals and IT professionals spend many hours managing thousands of prints and frame and matting materials. Their tasks include selecting the prints and the types of framing material to sell. They also must upload, manage, and download prints and framing material onto and off of the website. The IT staff tells you much of their time is spent with framing and matting material. Only a highly skilled IT professional can properly scan a print and load it up to the site so that it graphically represents what the print will look like when properly matted and framed. In addition, you discover that a different team of IT professionals is dedicated to optimizing the operating performance of the website. These costs are classified as manufacturing overhead because a substantial amount of work is required to keep the site integrated with purchasing and production and to safeguard Wall Decor's assets online. Most time-consuming is the effort to develop and maintain the site so that customers can view the prints as they would appear either un framed or framed and matted. A discussion with the IT professionals suggests that the time spent develop ing and maintaining the site for the unframed prints is considerably less than that required for the framed prints and in particular for the framed and matted prints. Developing and maintaining a site that can display the unframed prints is relatively straightforward. It becomes more complicated when the site must allow the customer to view every possible combination of print with every type of steel frame, and immensely more complicated when one considers all of the possible wood frames and different matting colors. Obviously a very substantial portion of the IT professionals' time and resources is required to present the over 1.000 different framing and matting options Based on your preliminary findings, you have decided that the company's ability to measure and evaluate the profitability of individual products would be improved if the company employed an activity-based costing (ABC) system. As a first step in this effort, you compiled a list of costs, activities and values. Your work consisted of taking the original manufacturing overhead cost ($375,200, provided in Case 1) and allocating the costs to activities. You identified four activities: picking prints; inventory selection and management (includes general management and overhead); website optimization; and framing and matting cost (includes equipment, insurance, rent, and supervisor's salary) The first activity is picking prints. The estimated overhead related to this activity is $30,000. The cost driver for this activity is the number of prints. It is expected that the total number of prints will be 102,000. This is the sum of 80,000 unframed, 15.000 steel-framed, and 7.000 wood-framed. illustration CA 2-1 Information for activity Activity Picking prints Estimated Overhead $30,600 Cost Driver Number of prints Expected Use of Cost Driver (50,000+ 15,000+ 7.000) 102.000 prints CA-8 Greetings case 2 Cases for Management Decision-Making The second activity is inventory selection and management. The estimated overhead related to this activity is $91,700. The cost driver for this activity is the number of components per print item. An unframed print has one component a steel Framed print has two components (the print and the frame), and a wood framed print has three components (the print, the mat, and the frame). The total number of components is expected to be 131.000 Illustration CA 2-2 Estimated Expected Use of Information for activity 2 Activity Cost Driver Overhead Cost Driver Inventory Number of $91,700 Prints: 80,000 components selection and components Print and frame: 15.000 x 2 management Print (1) 30,000 components Print and frame (2) Print, mat, and frame Print, mat, and frame (3) 7.000 X 3 = 21,000 components Total 131.000 components The third activity is website optimization. The total overhead cost related to website optimization is expected to be $129,000. It was difficult to identify a cost driver that directly related website optimization to the products. In order to re- flect the fact that the majority of the time spent on this activity related to framed prints, you first split the cost of website optimization between unframed prints and framed prints. Based on your discussion with the IT professionals, you deter mined that they spend roughly one fifth of their time developing and maintain ing the site for unframed prints, and the other focir-fifths of their time on framed prints, even though the number of framed prints sold is substantially less than the number of unframed prints. As a consequence, you allocated $25,800 of the over head costs related to website optimization to unframed prints and $103.200 to framed prints. You contemplated having three categories (unframed, steel-framed. and wood-framed with matting), but chose not to add this additional refinement. illustration CA 2-3 Information for activity 3 Cost Driver Estimated Overhead Expected Use of Cost Driver Activity Website optimization: Unframed $ 25,800 Number of prints at capacity Number of prints at capacity Framed $103.200 Unframed prints 100,000 print capacity Framed and/or matted prints 25.000 print capacity (16,000 stoel: 9,000 wood) Once the $129,000 of the third activity was allocated across the two broad product categories, the number of prints at operating capacity was used as the cost driver. Note that operating capacity was used instead of expected units sold The overhead costs related to website optimization are relatively fixed because the employees are salaried. If a fixed cost is allocated using a value that varies from period to period (like expected sales), then the cost per unit will vary from period to period. When allocating fixed costs it is better to use a base that does not vary as much, such as operating capacity. The advantage of using operating capacity as the base is that it keeps the fixed costs per unit stable over time. CA-9 case 2 Cases for Management Decision Making Greetings The final activity is framing and matting. The expected overhead costs related to framing and matting are $123.900. None of this overhead cost should be allo cated to unframed prints. The costs related to framing and matting are relatively fixed because the costs relate to equipment and other costs that do not vary with sales volume. As a consequence, like website optimization, you chose to base the cost driver on levels at operating capacity, rather than at the expected sales level. The cost driver is the number of components. Steel-framed prints have two com ponents (the print and frame), and wood-framed prints have three components (the print, mat, and frame). The total components at operating capacity would be steel frame 32,000 (or 16,000 x 2) and wood frame 27,000 (or 9,000 X 3,000). Illustration CA 2-4 Information for activity 4 Estimated Overhead $123.900 Activity Framing and matting cost (equipment, insurance. rent. and supervisory labor) Cost Driver Number of components at capacity Expected Use of Cost Driver Print and frame: 16,000 X 2 - 32,000 components al capacity Print, mat, and frame: 9,000 3-27,000 components at capacity Total = 59,000 components To summarize, the overhead costs and cost drivers used for each product are expected to be illustration CA 2-5 Summary of overhead costs and cost drivers Steel Wood- Framed, Framed, No with Overhead Unframed Matting Matting Total Cost 80.000 15,000 7.000 102.000 $ 30.000 Cost Activity Driver 1. Picking Number of prints prints 2. Inventory Number of selection and components management 3. Website Number of optimization prints at capacity 4. Framing and Number of matting components al capacity 30,000 80,000 100,000 21,000 131.000 100,000 91.700 25,800 16,000 9,000 25,000 103.200 na 32,000 27.000 59,000 123.900 $375.200 Instructions Answer the following questions 1. Identify two reasons why an activity-based costing system may be appropriate for Wall Decor 2. Compute the activity based overhead rates for each of the four activities 3. Discuss the implications of using operating capacity as the cost driver rather than the expected units sold when allocating fixed overhead costs. 4. (a) Allocate the overhead to the three product categories (unframed prints, steel framed prints, and wood-framed prints with matting), assuming that the estimate of the expected units sold is correct and the actual amount of overhead incurred equaled the estimated amount of $375.200 (b) Calculate the total amount of overhead allocated. Explain why the total overticad of $375,200 was not allocated, even though the estimate of sales was correct. What are the implications of this for management