Inventory Accounting part 10

Nếu có một chỉ thị quản lý để làm giảm tổng mức đầu tư trong hàng tồn kho, các nhân viên lập kế hoạch sản xuất có thể có ít thời gian để làm như vậy, đặc biệt là nếu có hàng ngàn các bộ phận trong kho để được xem xét. Một lựa chọn đơn giản là chỉ làm giảm mức hàng tồn kho cho các tập hợp con của mục có mức độ sử dụng cao.
Nội dung trích xuất từ tài liệu:
Inventory Accounting part 10 Inventory Best Practices / 207ment, including in the discussion the cost of this policy in terms of incremental in-ventory investment. High customer service levels may mandate a large safety stock for each finishedgoods item. However, what if product demand is highly seasonal? Safety stocklevels may still result in stock outs during high-demand periods and excessive in-ventory during low-demand periods. To avoid this problem, consider schedulingperiodic adjustments to safety stock levels for those inventory items that areknown to have seasonal demand. If there is a management directive to reduce the total investment in inventory,the production planning staff may have little time to do so, especially if there arethousands of parts in stock to be reviewed. A simple alternative is to only reduceinventory levels for the subset of items with high usage levels. The turnover rateson these items is so rapid that any reduction actions taken will be reflected in an in-ventory reduction in a short period. Conversely, if inventory reduction actions weretaken on slow-moving inventory, it could be months before there is any discernibleimpact on the total inventory investment. The planning staff can save more time inreducing inventory by using an in-house material requirements planning system tomodel the impact of changes in safety stock, lot sizes, or lead times on the totallevel of inventory investment. A company may distribute inventory to customers from regional warehouses.If so, it must stock a sufficient inventory quantity in each location to meet expectedcustomer demand. An alternative is to centralize the storage of smaller or expensiveitems, so a smaller quantity can be stored in one location for distribution to all cus-tomers. This approach circumvents regional warehouses and their primary reasonfor existence—rapid delivery to customers—so be sure to only centralize those in-ventory items that can reasonably be inexpensively shipped by overnight deliveryservices directly to customers. This usually calls for a cost-benefit analysis to de-termine which inventory items should be treated in this manner. A warehouse network is designed to ship inventory in the most economicalmanner possible to regional customer clusters. Given this objective, warehousesmust be carefully sited within each region for maximum effect. However, customerschange over time, as does the quantity of their purchases, so one should occasion-ally rationalize the warehouse network through a regularly scheduled warehouseanalysis. This is not a frequent event, because a warehouse location must be clearlyinefficient before a company should undertake the considerable expense requiredto move to a new location. 16 Inventory Transfer Pricing1 16-1 IntroductionMany organizations sell their own products internally—from one division to an-other. This is especially common in vertically integrated situations, where a com-pany has elected to control the key pieces of its supply chain, perhaps to “lockdown” the supply of key components. Each division sells its products to a down-stream division that includes those products in its own production processes.When this happens, management must determine the prices at which componentswill be sold between divisions. This is known as transfer pricing. The level oftransfer price used is important, because the managers of each division use it to de-termine if they should sell to an internal division or externally, on the open market.If the transfer price is set too low, then the managers will have an incentive to selloutside of the company, even if the organization as a whole would benefit from agreater volume of internal transfers. Similarly, an excessively high transfer pricewill result in too many internal sales, when some external ones would have yieldeda higher overall profit. Because of its great impact on the operational behavior ofcorporate divisions, great care must be taken in selecting the most appropriate trans-fer price. This chapter covers a wide range of transfer pricing methods, as well as severalspecial issues involving them. It concludes with a summary and comparison of allof the transfer pricing methods. 16-2 The Importance of Transfer PricingTransfer pricing levels are important in companies experiencing any of the fol-lowing three transfer or operational characteristics: High volumes of interdivisional sales. This is most common in vertically inte- grated companies, where each division in succession produces a component that1Adapted with permission from Chapter 30 of Bragg, Cost Accounting: A ComprehensiveGuide, John Wiley & Sons, 2001. 209210 ...