Salter Manufacturing Company Produces Inventory in a Highly Automated Assembly

question 106

Essay

Salter Manufacturing Company produces inventory in a highly automated assembly plant in Fall River, Massachusetts. The automated system is in its first year of operation and management is still unsure of the best way to estimate the overhead costs of operations for budgetary purposes. For the first six months of operations, the following data were collected:

Required:
a.Use the high-low method to determine the estimating cost function with machine-hours as the cost driver.
b.Use the high-low method to determine the estimating cost function with kilowatt-hours as the cost driver.
c.For July, the company ran the machines for 4,000 hours and used 4,550,000 kilowatt-hours of power. The overhead costs totaled $365,000. Which cost driver was the best predictor for July?

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Definitions:

Equal Sample Sizes

A condition in experimental design or analysis where all groups or conditions have the same number of observations.

Confidence Interval

A range of values, derived from a data set, that is likely to contain the value of an unknown population parameter with a certain degree of confidence.

Margin Of Error

The range of uncertainty or the maximum expected difference between the true population parameter and a sample estimate of that parameter.

Sample Standard Deviations

A measure of the dispersion or variability of a sample dataset, indicating how much the individual data points differ from the sample mean.