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20传统成本会计
Virtually all manufacturing companies use their inventory valuation
systems to measure product costs. As discussed earlier, this system,
in today's environment of large indirect expenses and product diversity,
produces highly distorted product costs. Service companies, who
have not had to assign expenses to their products for financial statement
purposes, have operated for decades without knowing product
costs. They collected costs in functional or responsibility categories
but made little effort to assign accurately their operating expenses to
their products and customers.
At its simplest level, product cost distortions occur in virtually all
organizations producing and selling multiple products. An example
provides a simple illustration of the sources of the distortion. Consider
two factories, both malung pens using identical capital equipment and
physical facilities. Plant I is a focused producer that manufactures
only blue pens, 1.000.000 units per year. Plant I1 is a full line producer.
In addition to producing blue pens, (100.000 per year), it produces
a variety of other colors : 100.000 black, 50.000 red, 20.000 green and
so on. Plant I1 also produces a wide variety of specialty colors (such
as 800 purple pens per year), plus pens that write on a variety of surfaces
(flip charts, transparencies, white boards, etc.). All together,
Plant 11, like Plant I, produces 1.000.000 pens per year, but with several
thousand different color, packaging, and writing surface combinations.
Despite the similarity in product, physical facilities, and total output
of the two plants, a visitor walking through them would notice
dramatic differences. Plant I1 contains many more people : to schedule
machines, perform setups, inspect output after each setup, to
schedule, receive and inspect incoming materials and packages, to
move, count and value inventory, expedite orders, rework defective
materials, design and implement engineering change orders, negotiate
with vendors, issue purchase orders, and update and program
the much larger computer-based information system. Plant I1 also
operates with much higher levels of idle time, overtime, inventory,
rework, and scrap.
Any traditional cost system will assign about 10% of Plant 11's overhead
cost to blue pens. Whether indirect costs are assigned based on
direct labor-hours, machine-hours, material quantities, or units produced,
blue pens represent 10% of the plant's volume of activity and
will, therefore, receive 10% of the plant's indirect costs. Similarly, a
low volume product such as the 800 purple pens produced each year
would have .08% (800 divided by 1.000.000) of the plant's indirect
costs assigned to it. If a blue and a purple pen had the same labor
times, machine processing times, and direct material costs, then the
standard cost of the two products would be identical under any traditional
cost system.
The strategic consequences from using such a cost system can be
disastrous. Over time, the market price for blue pens, and for most
high-volume standard products, will be determined by focused and efficient
producers like Plant I. Managers of Plant I1 will find it difficult
to compete in the blue pen market because their reported profit margins
in these lines will be low or even negative. The managers of Plant
I1 will look for profit growth in their new product lines - designer colors,
specialized writing surfaces - where they earn attractive price
premiums, perhaps 10 to 20 percent. They will de-emphasize standard
commodity-like products where the plant seems uncompetitive, and
shift to an expanded line of specialty products with unique features
and options, and generally much smaller unit volumes. Of course, scaling
back on blue pens and proliferating the product line to replace
the lost volumes will create new demands for overhead and support
resources, raising costs even further.
-- by 会员 colinkelly (2012/5/13 20:08:21)