In the Pleistocene era of manufacturing cost accounting (actually, only about one hundred years ago – it just seems longer), product costs were classified as: Labor, Materials and, Overhead – in that order. The order was not haphazard; it connoted the relative importance in dollar size of each. Labor was then the highest cost component, materials was next and overhead was a poor third. Well, now at the dawn of the twenty-first century and actually around the middle of the twentieth century, the order is reversed. Overhead is the most expensive component of the cost equation. In fact, as labor declines to third in the cost hierarchy and materials costs begin to stabilize in some of the mature manufacturing companies, the management of overhead spending can be the strategic management element in the profitability success equation. Knowing that overhead is the major component of manufacturing spending and putting aside the arcane methods for its accounting and allocation, how then can the senior management of manufacturing companies discern value in overhead in relation to its cost? Let’s take a look at some of the options and combine them into an overall program to find the value and reduce the costs.
What really is manufacturing overhead?
In plain managerial terms, manufacturing overhead is that agglomeration of expenses that don’t “add value” to the products made by the enterprise. Non-value-added activities, now the bogeyman of the era of Lean Manufacturing, are those activities that customers wouldn’t pay for if they knew the extent to which they existed. The most cited example of non-value-added activity is a quality inspection function. The customers would be saying to themselves, why would I want to pay for this when you the manufacturer should have been able to get it right the first time? The strategic implication being, of course, that if we were able to reduce or eliminate non-value added activities; the customer would not have to pay for them through lower prices. The potential for lower prices is largely a near term marketing issue but, in the long run, the costs incurred for products have a structural impact on a company’s and an industry’s prices and profitability. Recognizing that all non-value-added activities can’t be eliminated, some are placed in the category of “non-value-added, but necessary.” These are typically those that are driven by regulations (e.g., GMP, OSHA, FDA, SEC etc.). Other non-value-added activities, despite not being regulation driven, are tenacious in their seemingly innate ability to survive because people believe that if they weren’t incurred, dire consequences would follow.
From a micro-economic perspective, manufacturing overhead is a large component of the break-even point of the enterprise and therefore part of squeezing out value lies in minimizing it. It is the fixed period cost base that the enterprise must cover with incremental gross margin. Accounting gives us numerous expense classification and departmental views of overhead in the detail needed to analyze and reduce/contain this strategically important manufacturing cost component.
Manufacturing overhead has a time and variability dimension…
General
