L A Darling Store Fixtures

Quotations and Profitability

L A Darling is one of the oldest and most diversified Store Fixture Manufacturers-plant in North America. They provide a catalogue of products as well as turnkey installation of complete retail environments. Pricing in this kind of environment is complex and competition for business is intense.

Provided a multi-plant integrated, automated profitability reporting framework that provided summary and detailed actual revenue and costs, by division, customer, product, and supplier. This included a workflow component for manual data collection and significant integration into Darling's manufacturing, accounting, and sales and order processing applications.

The resulting repository of costing and profitability information ensured that Darling's quotes provide appropriate margin and competitive advantage.

This system was the basis for much of Part 4 and the related exercises in Charles Horngren's “Introduction to Management Accounting” (Horngren, C. T., Sundem, G. L., Burgstahler, David & Schatzberg, Jeff. (2014). Introduction to Management Accounting Sixteenth Edition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-305878-9). In Cost Accounting education this is a fundamental text.