Question

Section IV: Alternative Costing Method

Hampshire has always produced stick umbrellas. However, it isconsidering expanding its production to include collapsibleumbrellas. This consideration has been spurred by Tours Today, atouring company that is interested in providing its customers withcollapsible umbrellas imprinted with its logo. The management atHampshire is currently working out a deal with the touring companyto produce 3,000 collapsible umbrellas and believes it can sellthose umbrellas for $14.00 each. Here are the costs that can bedirectly traced to this special order:

Direct Materials: $9,300

Direct Labor Hours: 600

Hourly Rate of Direct labor: $8.00

In the traditional costing approach, overhead is applied at therate of $24.60 per labor hour. This expansion in production willadd additional overhead costs. The total overhead costs (assumingproduction of the stick and collapsible umbrellas) to include thecost pools and cost drivers are provided in Table 2.

An alternative costing method that might benefit Hampshire isthe implementation of activity-based costing (ABC).Hampshire would like to implement an ABC approach to analyze theproduction of this special order of collapsible umbrellas. Thecontroller has assembled the following information:

	Stick	Collapsible
Units Sold	60,000	3,000
Selling Price	$12.50	$14.00
Direct Material Cost per Unit	$3	$3.10
Direct Labor Cost per Hour	$7.50	$8.00
Variable Manufacturing Overhead	$0.40	$0.40
Variable Selling Costs	$1.10	$1.10
Labor Hours per Unit	0.2	0.2
Sales Orders	120	1
Purchase Orders	50	3
Production Runs	45	6
Material Moves	86	10
Machine Setups	130	6
Machine Hours	525	32
Inspections	200	10
Shipments	60	3

Table 1: Direct Cost Information and Activities

Activity	Activity Cost	Activity Cost Driver
Order Processing	$35,000	Number of Sales Orders
Purchasing	$36,000	Number of Purchase Orders
Material Handing	$28,000	Material Moves
Machine Setup	$14,000	Machine Setups
Production	$99,000	Production Runs
Assembly	$80,000	Machine Hours
Inspecting	$11,000	Number of Inspections
Shipping	$7,500	Number of Shipments

Table 2: Activity Cost Pools and Cost Drivers

Another alternative to traditional costing and ABC istime-driven activity-based costing (TDABC). You will need todetermine which of these three methods would be the best approachfor the Hampshire Company. The following article may assist you inyour analysis: Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing. Additionally,you may want to use the Shapiro Library to conduct further researchon the three methods. You will need to defend your position whenanswering the prompts for the written portion of this section.

Using the information provided above, complete the following inthe Hampshire Company Spreadsheet in order to assist you inresponding to all components of Section IV:

1.Calculate the allocation rates foreach cost driver using ABC.

2.Use the traditional costing approachto calculate the total cost and the unit cost of the stick andcollapsible umbrellas.

3.Use ABC to compute the total costsand the unit cost for the stick and collapsible umbrellas.

4.Compute the difference between theproduct cost per stick and collapsible umbrellas using the unitcost that you computed with the traditional approach and the onethat you computed using ABC.