John Deer Case Study

The following report is a consultation analysis of John Deere Component Works costing structure. Included is a discussion of the existing cost system as well as a comparison with the proposal of the Activity Based Costing system. The solutions to the required discussion issues have been thoroughly prepared and are hereby included.

Problem Statement:

The demand for John Deere Component Work's (JDCW's) products has suffered due to the collapse of farmland value and commodity prices. A number of continuous failures in JDCW's competition for bids have placed an onus upon management to question its current costing methods. As a result, an analysis must be made regarding the current costing methods in order to determine their validity and to aid the company in adopting a more sound costing system.

Analysis

John Deere Component Works was a subdivision of John Deere and Company which dealt exclusively with the manufacturing of tractor component parts. By the mid 1980's, JDCW found that its available excess capacity was increasing. To neutralize this problem JDCW attempted to take advantage of the efficiencies of its newly acquired automatic turning machines by bidding on parts offered from within the company. This lead to a direct bid of 275 of the 635 parts offered by John Deere and Company. Out of the possible 275 parts, JDCW was successful in the bidding of only 58 parts, which happened to be low volume parts. This became a concern for JDCW because its aim was to attain the bids that offered the higher volume parts, as to allow it to take advantage of its machine's high volume efficiency. In reality, the problem for JDCW was not the number of bids they received, but the alarming discrepancy within its bid prices and that of its competitors. JDCW realized that something was wrong in their accounting system, and decided to review its current cost structures.

The existing cost system is strong in that it is simple and easy to maintain. Overhead allocation was based on direct labor hours, machine hours and material dollars. The use of standard costs allows JDCW to compare actual labor overhead costs with budgeted rates in order to determine the following years' overhead costs. In fact, the old cost structure worked quite well in the past since the company produced a specialized line of products that was periodically consistent. This in the aspect that the products differed little or not at all in both unit and volume.

However, this cost method does not provide the best system for JDCW's cost allocation. By using only three overhead rates the present system grossly undermines the true production costs since other activities of the production process are not acknowledged. The system also fails to compute material usage variances, which only further discredits the accuracy of the accounting