Case Enager industries lnc
I don't get it re got a nifty new product proposal that can't help but make money, and top management turns thumbs down. No matter how we price this new tem expect to make $390,000 on it pretax. That would contribute over 15 cents per share to our earnings after taxes which is more than the 10 cent earnings per share increase in 2015 that annual report. It just does the president made such a big thing about in the shareholders' annual report. Lt just doesn’t make sense for the president to be touting e.p.s. while his subordinates are rejecting profitable projiect like this one.
The frustrated speaker was Sarah McNeil, product development manager of the Consumer Products Division of Enager Industries, Inc. Enager was a relatively young company which had grown rapidly its 2015 over to sales level of S222 million. (See Exhibits 1 and financial data for 2014 and 2015)
Enager had three divisions-consumer Products, Industrial Products, and professional Services-each of which accounted for about one-third of Enager's total sales. Consumer Products, the oldest of the three divisions, designed, manufactured, and marketed a line house ware items, primarily for use in the kitchen. The Industrial Products Division built one-of-a-kind machine tools to customer specifications(i.e., it was a large"job shop"), with a typical taking several months to compete. The Professional Services Division, the newest of the had been added to Enager by acquiring a large firm that provided land planning landscape architecture, structural architecture, and consulting engineering services. This division has grown rapidly, in part because of its capability to perform"environmental impact studies, as required by law on many new land development projects
Because of the differing nature of their activities, each division was treated as an essentially independent company. There were only a few corporate-level managers and staff people, whose job was to coordinate the activities of the three divisions. One aspect of this coordination was that all new project proposals requiring investment in excess of $1500000 had to be reviewed by the chief financial officer, Henry Hubbard. It was Hubbard who had recently rejected McNeil's new product proposal, the essentials of which are shown in Exhibit 3
Performance Evaluation
Prior to 2014, each division had been treated as a profit center, with annual division profit budgets negotiated between the president and the respective division general managers At the urging of Henry Hubbard. Enager’s president, Carl had decided to begin each division as an investment center, so as to be able to relate each division's profit to the assets the division used to generate its profits.
Starting in 2014, each division was measured as based on its return on assets, which defined to be the division's net income divided by its total assets. Net income for a division calculated by taking the division's direct income before taxes," then subtracting the div share of corporate administrative expenses(allocated on the basis of divisional revenue its share of income tax expense the tax rate applied to the division direct income be taxes" after subtraction the allocated corporate administrative expenses