Enager by acquiring a large firm that provided land planning, landscape architecture, structural architecture, and consulting services. This division had grown rapidly, in part because of its capability to perform environmental impact studies.
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 proposals requiring investment in excess of $500,000 had to be reviewed by the corporate vice president of finance, Henry Hubbard. It was Hubbard who had recently rejected McNeil’s new product proposal, the essentials of which are shown in Exhibit 4.
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
Prior 1996, each division had been treated as a profit center, with annual division profit budgets negotiated between the president and the respective division general managers. In 1995, Enager’s president, Carl Randall, had become concerned about high interest rates and their impact on the company’s profitability. At the urging of Henry Hubbard, Randall had decided to begin treating 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 1996, each division was measured based on its return on assets, which was defined as the division’s net income divided by its total assets. Net income for a division was calculated by taking the division’s “direct income before taxes” and then subtracting the division’s share of corporate administrative expenses (allocated on the basis of divisional revenues) and its share of income tax expense (the tax rate applied to the division’s direct income before taxes” after subtraction of the allocated corporate administrative expenses). Although Hubbard realized there were other ways to define a division’s income be and the president preferred this method since “it made the sum of the [divisional] parts equal to the [corporate] whole.”
Similarly, Enager’s total assets were subdivided among the three divisions. Since each division operated in physically separate facilities, it was easy to am…… most assets, including receivables, to specific division. The corporate-office assets, including the centrally controlled cash account, were allocated to the divisions on the basis of divisional revenues. All fixed assets were recorded at their balance sheet values, that is, original cost less accumulated straight-line depreciation. Thus,