Variable costing and segment reporting: Tools for management
When it comes to state-of-the-art in automation, IBM’s $2.5 billion semiconductor manufacturing facility in East Fishkill, New York, is tough to beat. The plant uses wireless networks, 600 miles of cable, and more than 420 servers to equip itself with what IBM claims is more computing power than NASNA uses to launch a space shuttle.
Each batch of 25 wafers (one wafer can be processed into 1,000 computer chips) travels through the East Fishkill plant’s manufacturing process without ever being touched by human hands. A computer system “looks at orders and schedules production runs…adjusts schedules to allow for planned maintenance and … feeds vast reams of production data into enterprise-wide management and financial-reporting systems.” The plant can literally run itself as was the case a few years ago when a snowstorm hit and everyone went home while the automated system continued to manufacture computer chips until it ran out of work.
In a manufacturing environment such as this, labor costs are insignificant and fixed overhead costs are huge. There is a strong temptation to build inventories and increase profits without increasing sales. How can this be done you ask? It would seem logical that producing more units would have no impact on profits unless the units were sold, right? Wrong! As we will discover in this chapter, absorption costing-the most widely used method of determining product costs-can artificially increase profits by increasing the quantity of units produced.