Harvard Business School 5-191-029 Rev. April 27, 1993 Destin Brass Products Co. ost Teaching Note Substantive Issues Raised The managers of Destin Brass Products a y or P re struggling to understand the relationship between their costs and prices for each of the three products produced and sold by Destin. One of the products, pumps, is coming under increasingly competitive price pressure. As a result, Destin has been unable to maintain its desired profit margin. At the same time, Destin has been able to raise prices on another product, flow controllers, apparently with no effect on demand and no increase in competition from other manufacturers. As a result of these situations, management is increasingly questioning whether it knows the true manufacturing costs of its products. At the time of the case, Destin was using a conventional cost accounting system in which all overhead was allocated to product based on direct labor dollars. The controller had already recommended to the company president that they might consider a more modern cost accounting system with a somewhat more-refined allocation system, using material cost and machine hours to allocate overhead related to material receiving and handling. A third possible system in which overhead would be allocated based on transactions (an activity-based costing system, or ABC system) is described in the case by the manufacturing manager in such a way that the costs of products under that system can be estimated and compared to the costs under the other two alternative systems. With three sets of product costs to compare, managers are in a position to ask questions about what is causing costs and which system gives the best information for possible decisions they might have to make, as well as for understanding the competitive responses they are observing in their product