Siemens Electric Motor Works Case Study

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Case Report-Siemens Electric Motor Works

Group Members: Yang ZOU(Mandy) (5330162)
Lin SUN(Chris) (5289426)
Abu Naser Lmtiaz (5271713)
Wenjun WANG(Sara) (5287925)
Binglu WANG(Lucy) (5061742)

Executive Summary
Siemens Electric Motor Works was the only factory in West Germany to manufacture electrical motors after the World War two. Because of the lower labor rates of its competitors, the management decided to produce low volume of special A/C motors rather than high volume of standard motors. Accordingly, in order to match the new strategy, EMW applied new cost system instead of the traditional cost system due to some problems. Firstly, the traditional cost system could not provide correct information when calculated support related costs of customized motors. Secondly, the traditional cost system unable to reflect the relationship between the increased support costs and change in product mix (“Siemens Electric Motor Works, 1997”).
Comparing two cost systems, the new system added two new cost pools based on the traditional one, which usually allocated support costs to material, labor and supported related cost pools. The old system did not reflect the increasing support costs of specialty products so that it was unable to reduce costs and provide a good choice for the plant on how to choose profitable orders. From our calculations (Exhibit 3), the new system transferred engineering costs and Administrative costs to order processing costs pool and special components cost pool similarly. It shows that the new system is more clear and efficient on cost reduced and al...

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...were mostly driven by the order processing costs and special components costs. So in the new system, the costs in each support related cost pools were removed to these two new cost pools. 6300 engineering costs were transferred to order processing cost and 27000 administrative costs were transferred to special components cost. Therefore, the base motor cost and special components cost would be more accurate and financial manager would not underestimate or overestimate the value of each product. Last but not least, because each of five motors has different and accurate total costs compared to the costs under traditional costs system, it would be helpful for managers to determine which orders should be chosen or be abandoned. And it would bring more profits to firms and enough capital to invest in the future even though lost some less profitable sales to competitors.

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