Bridgeton Industries Essay

1. Describe the agonistical environment for Bridgeton as well as the toll story system currently in use.When foreign emulation and scarce, expensive gasoline began to play an important role in the market, Bridgeton began to fall behind domestic market share. The ACF Bridgeton plant faced new challenges in their fruit that led them to serious cutbacks like the closing of the ACF plant for manufacture of fuel-efficient diesel motor engines. By 1987, they social classified their products in terms of world class competitive position and potential. With four criteria (quality, customer service, technical capability and competitive cost position) they classified their products in sectionalisation I (remain), II (observe) and III (outsource). The sort allowed Bridgeton to take decisions on how to better manage their products performance compared to their competitors. The cost accounting system was product be, a mixed between job costing and march costing. 2. Explain why manifolds moved from Class II to Class III after oil pans and muffler-exhaust systems had been outsourced from the ACF.Despite improvements in the production process manifolds were downgraded from Class II to III. The results were not sufficient, even though they increased the uptime from an second-rate of 30% to 65% they were behind their Japanese competitors that reached a world class goal of 80% uptime. In addition, as seen in Exhibit 2, the strike material costs for manifolds (based on stainless steel) is extremely high as a percentage of sales (around 40%) compared to the other products manufactured at ACF and at a better Class level.However, there was a inquiry on this move due to the possibility of new market requirements for lightness weight (more efficient manifolds). This represented a good opportunity for ACF because as they manufactured manifolds with stainless steel, demand could increase and therefore selling expense too.