a crab-walking minesweeper for the department of defense. [and] a rugged oil-well-repair bot for Halliburton." Clearly, job-order costing was appropriate for these projects.
in the mid-1990s, iRobot pitched an idea for a story-telling machine to toy maker Hasbro, Inc. The machine, a plastic-molded tableau with a little characters surrounding a child's book, could actually act out the story, with dialogue and gestures. It was "unbelievably cool." Unfortunately, it was also unbelievably costly --- total direct materials alone cost $3,000 clearly, this toy was not destined for Toys "R" Us with a $19.95 price point. Hasbro turned thumbs down on the project. The result was that iRobot CEO Colin Angle began to pay close attention to cost control, and by 2000, he had a good understanding of the cost control needed for consumer products. His company developed the roomba, a small, disk shaped vacuum cleaner. Currently in production, the roomba reflects iRobot's shift, for this type of the project, from "high-cost prototype design to every-penny-counts mass production." Before, the total bid cost of the project was important, but mass production requires attention to every component's cost.