Customer Profitability at Stoke plc
Introduction Managers at Stoke ple have been using various teams to collect activity-based data since 2000. Each team has consisted of one or more management accountants working closely with department managers. The teams typically work for 3-6 months on data collection and developing spreadsheets. To date the teams have mainly focused on product costing Recently two teams have been set up to collect data Lo improve the company's understanding of customer-related costs and profitability. One team has looked at distribution costs and the second at order related costs.
Only 3 customers were included in the analysis. Theses 3 customers represent 10 of total sales. The company has approximately 250 customers in total Finally the teams only considered labour related costs and direct costs for the cost pools.
The first objective for each team was to estimate the total annual overhead cost and annual volume for each cost driver. As the company only focused on three customers the data was quickly estimated. The second objective was to estimate