In today’s competitive world of business, having accurate information may be the key factor in distinguishing between the loser and the winner. Using more accurate cost information while determining the optimal product mix of a company may lead management to make better decisions, and as a result, may have a great effect on the success of a company.
Mabin and Gibson argue that TOC and spreadsheet LP approaches can complement each other and provide effective decision aids. They consider LP as a good starting point for the production plan and suggest that the five step improvement process of TOC be used to improve the system based on the results obtained from linear programming.
If a traditional overhead cost allocation method is used in calculating the profitability of a product. The result of an LP solution may even suggest that management should produce unprofitable products. What is needed is a model that will help managers in determining the optimal product mix by using the more accurate product cost information. This new model must be able to give management the right information about the capacity-constrained product mix of a company. It must also be able to determine right processes the management should focus on to improve the performance of the system. Finally, it must be able to demonstrate the effects of various alternatives, such as outsourcing one or more of the activities performed in the company or increasing the capacity of the bottleneck operation by using an inefficient method to produce products, on the performance of the whole system.
This research demonstrates that inaccurate product cost information may lead managers to choose a non-optimal product mix and to focus improvement efforts on the wrong processes. As a result, they may decrease the profitability of a company substantially. A mathematical model that uses the activity-based cost information is developed in this thesis to determine the optimal product mix. This model is proposed to be used in combination with the TOC approach to focus on the right activity-based cost information is developed in this thesis to determine the optimal product mix. This model is proposed to be used in combination with the TOC approach to focus on the right activities to improve the system