Lecture 19 - Management accounting in production firms (strategic) Flashcards
How do we define quality?
Generally the term quality refers to a wide variety of factors: fitness for use, the degree to which a product satisfies the needs of a customer and the degree to which a product conforms to design specification and engineering requirements.
What are two basic aspects of quality?
Quality of design: measures how closely the characteristics of products or services match the needs and wants of customers
Conformance quality: the performance of a product or service according to design and production specifications.
How can quality be an important competitive advantage?
Long-term effects on gaining or defending market shares and revenues
Quality problems cause substantial costs
Non-financial and qualitative effects of quality improvement
What are costs of quality?
The costs of quality are costs incurred to prevent, or costs arising as a result of, the production of a low-quality product. These costs focus on conformance quality and are incurred in all business functions of the value chain.
1 Explain four cost categories in a cost of quality programme
Four cost categories in a costs of quality programme are:
Prevention costs (costs incurred in precluding the manufacture of products that do not conform to specifications)
Appraisal costs (costs incurred in detecting which of the individual products produced do not conform to specifications)
Internal failure costs (costs incurred when a non-conforming product is detected before its shipment to customers)
External failure costs (costs incurred when a non-conforming product is detected after its shipment to customers).
What is a five step activity-based approach to determine costs of quality?
Step 1: Identify all quality-related activities and activity cost pools.
Step 2: Determine the quantity of the cost-allocation base for each quality-related activity.
Step 3: Calculate the rate per unit of each cost-allocation base
Step 4: Calculate the costs of each quality related activity
Step 5: Obtain the total costs of quality (add it all up)
Why should we not assume that costs reported on COQ reports represent the total costs of quality?
It does not include opportunity costs, such as foregone profit and so on. Opportunity costs are difficult to estimate and generally not included in accounting systems. However, they can be a substantial and important driving force in quality-improvement programs.
4 Provide 4 examples of non-financial quality measures of customer satisfaction
Measures of customer satisfaction over time:
• Satisfaction with specific features
• Percentage of defect units delivered
• Number of customer complaints
• Delivery delays/on time delivery
Management investigates if these numbers deteriorate over time. If these numbers improve over time, management can be more confident about operating profit being strong in future years.
4 Provide 4 examples of non-financial quality measures of internal performance
Measures of internal quality:
• Number of defects for product lines
• Process yield (ratio good output to total output)
• Employee turnover (ratio of leaving employees to total employees)
• Employee empowerment/satisfaction
For a single reporting period, non-financial measures of quality have limited meaning, they are more informative when trends are examined over time.
What are 4 benefits of non-financial quality measures?
Useful indicators of future long-run performance
Revealing future needs and preferences of customers
Indicating specific areas of improvement
Feedback on the effects of quality improvement programs
5 Why do companies use both financial and non-financial measures of quality?
Financial measures are helpful to evaluate trade-offs among prevention and failure costs. They focus attention on how costly poor quality can be. Non-financial measures help focus attention on the precise problem areas that need attention.
2 Describe three methods that companies use to identify quality problems
Three methods that companies use to improve quality are control charts, to distinguish random variations from other sources of variation in an operating process; Pareto diagrams, which indicate how frequently each type of failure occurs; and cause-and-effect diagrams, which identify potential factors or causes of failure.
What is a control chart?
A control charts is a graph of a series of successive observations of a particular step, procedure or operation taken at regular intervals of time. Each observation is plotted relative to specified ranges that represent the expected distribution. Only those observations outside the specified limits are ordinarily regarded as non-random and worth investigating.
What is a Pareto diagram?
Observations outside control limits serve as inputs to Pareto diagrams. Indicates how frequently each type of failure occurs. E.g. histogram.
What is a cause-and-effect diagram?
The most frequently occurring problems identified by the Pareto diagram are analysed using cause-and-effect diagrams, which identifies potential causes of failures or defects.
What is the theory of constraints?
The theory of constraints describes methods to maximize operating profit when faced with some bottleneck and some non-bottleneck operations. The objective of TOC is to increase throughput contribution while decreasing investments and operating costs. TOC considers short-run time horizons and assumes other current operating costs to be fixed costs.
6 Define the three main measurements in the theory of constraints
The three main measurements in the theory of constraints are: Throughput contribution (equal to sales minus direct materials costs) Investments or stock (equal to the sum of materials costs of direct materials stock, work-in-progress stock and finished goods stock, R&D costs and costs of equipment and buildings); Operating costs (equal to all operating costs other than direct materials costs incurred to earn throughput contribution).
7 Explain how to manage
bottlenecks
The four steps in managing bottlenecks are:
(a) to recognise that the bottleneck operation determines throughput contribution
(b) to search for and find the bottleneck (by identifying resources with large quantities of stock waiting to be worked on)
(c) to keep the bottleneck busy and subordinate all non-bottleneck operations to the bottleneck operation. That is, the needs of the bottleneck resource determine the production schedule of non-bottleneck resources. I.e. to maximize overall contribution margin, the plant must maximize throughput contribution of the constrained or bottleneck resource.
(d) to increase bottleneck efficiency and capacity. The objective is to increase throughput contribution minus the incremental costs of taking such actions.
How can the theory of constraints be complementary to ABC systems?
TOC emphasises the management of bottlenecks as the key to improving the performance of the system as a whole. It focuses on the short-run maximization of throughput contribution. It is less useful for the long-run management of costs because it does not model the behaviour of costs or identify individual activities and cost drivers. By contrast, ABC systems take a longer-term perspective by attempting to eliminate non-value added activities and to reduce the costs of performing value-added activities. TOC is in this respect complementary to ABC systems.
1 Describe a just-in-time ( JIT) production system
Just-in-time production systems take a ‘demand-pull’ approach in which each component on a production line is produced immediately as needed by the next step in the production line to directly satisfy customer orders. In a JIT production line, manufacturing activity at any particular workstation is prompted by the need for that station’s output at the following station. Demand triggers each step of the production process, starting with customer demand for the finished product at one end of the process and working all the way back to the demand for direct materials at the other end of the process.
2 Identify the major features of a JIT production system
The five major features of a JIT production system are:
(a) organising production in manufacturing cells
(b) employing and training multiskilled workers
(c) emphasising total quality management
(d) reducing manufacturing lead time (the time from when and order is ready to start on the production line to when it becomes a finished good) and set-up time (the time required to get equipment, tools and materials ready to start the production)
(e) building strong supplier relationships.
How is the organisation of manufacturing cells in a JIT system different from conventional manufacturing plants?
Conventional manufacturing plants generally have a functional layout, in which machines that perform the same function are located in the same area or department. JIT plants, however, organise machines in cells designed around products. Different types of machines that perform different functions needed to manufacture a product, or a family of products, are placed close to each other. Materials move from one machine to another where various operations are performed in sequence.
What are the requirements for multiskilled workers in a JIT system?
Workers in a cell are trained to perform all operations within the cell. Workers can then be assigned to different machines as needed to achieve smooth production flow. Workers are also trained and expected to perform minor repairs and do maintenance. Quality testing and inspection are also the responsibility of the workers in a cell.
What happens if a defect is discovered in a JIT system?
The worker sets of an alarm to alert others and the operation is shut down. Because of the dynamics of the demand-pull system, when one operation shuts down, all production shuts down until the problem is solved.