Managerial Analysis
BYP17-2 Ideal Manufacturing Company of Sycamore, Illinois, has supported a research and development (R&D) department that has for many years been the sole contributor to the company's new farm machinery products. The R&D activity is an overhead cost center that provides services only to in-house manufacturing departments (four different product lines), all of which produce agricultural/farm/ranch related machinery products.
The department has never sold its services outside, but because of its long history of success, larger manufacturers of agricultural products have approached Ideal to hire its R&D department for special projects. Because the costs of operating the R&D department have been spiraling uncontrollably, Ideal's management is considering entertaining these outside approaches to absorb the increasing costs. But, (1) management doesn't have any cost basis for charging R&D services to outsiders, and (2) it needs to gain control of its R&D costs. Management decides to implement an activity-based costing system in order to determine the charges for both outsiders and the in-house users of the department's services. R&D activities fall into four pools with the following annual costs.
Market analysis $1,050,000
Product design 2,350,000
Product development 3,600,000
Prototype testing 1,400,000
Activity analysis determines that the appropriate cost drivers and their usage for the four activities are:
Total
Activities Cost Drivers Estimated Drivers
Market analysis Hours of analysis 15,000 hours
Product design Number of designs 2,500 designs
Product development Number of products 90 products
Prototype testing Number of tests 500 tests
(a) Compute the activity-based overhead rate for each activity cost pool.
Activity Cost Pools Total
Estimated
Overhead
รท Expected Use of
Cost Drivers
Per Activity
=
Activity-Based
Overhead Rates
Market analysis
Product design
Product development...