Question

Smoky Mountain Corporation makes two types of hiking boots—the Xtreme and the Pathfinder. Data concerning these two product lines appear below:

	Xtreme			Pathfinder
Selling price per unit	$	118.00		$	84.00
Direct materials per unit	$	65.00		$	52.00
Direct labor per unit	$	13.50		$	9.00
Direct labor-hours per unit		1.5	DLHs		1.0	DLHs
Estimated annual production and sales		28,000	units		65,000	units

The company has a traditional costing system in which manufacturing overhead is applied to units based on direct labor-hours. Data concerning manufacturing overhead and direct labor-hours for the upcoming year appear below:

Estimated total manufacturing overhead	$	1,819,000
Estimated total direct labor-hours		107,000	DLHs

Required:

1. Compute the product margins for the Xtreme and the Pathfinder products under the company’s traditional costing system.

2. The company is considering replacing its traditional costing system with an activity-based costing system that would assign its manufacturing overhead to the following four activity cost pools (the Other cost pool includes organization-sustaining costs and idle capacity costs):

	Estimated Overhead Cost			Expected Activity
Activities and Activity Measures				Xtreme	Pathfinder	Total
Supporting direct labor (direct labor-hours)	$	588,500		42,000	65,000	107,000
Batch setups (setups)		690,000		390	300	690
Product sustaining (number of products)		500,000		1	1	2
Other		40,500		NA	NA	NA
Total manufacturing overhead cost	$	1,819,000

Compute the product margins for the Xtreme and the Pathfinder products under the activity-based costing system.

3. Prepare a quantitative comparison of the traditional and activity-based cost assignments.

Answer 1