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The Super Project Case

Decent Essays

Executive Summary In the Super Project case, Crosby set out to argue that the current methodologies being utilized by General Foods Corporation to determine which capital investments to pursue did not always fit the bill. Crosby advocated using alternative methods for evaluation of Super including: 1) Incremental Basis, 2) Facilities Used Basis, and 3) Fully Allocated Basis. He provided the Corporate Budgets and Analysis management team with documentation that articulated each of the methods he used, the results obtained, discussion points, and ultimately his conclusions. As can be seen from the illustration below, each alternative provided vastly different outcomes, thus begging the question – which method should General Foods use? …show more content…

Here is a rundown of the variables we used to first determine the cash flows for Years 0 through 10: depreciation of equipment over the 10 years, sales minus COGS to identify gross profit, summed expenses (advertising, start-up, and Jell-o erosion only; the test market expense in Year 1 is considered a sunk cost and thus should not be included), and subtracted taxes to come up with the cash flow. When assessing the below issues, the team concluded the following Test Market expenses – This is a sunk cost and thus should not be included Overhead expenses – not project specific, in this case not a direct result from taking on the Super project so the team did not include Erosion of Jell-o contribution margin – This is clearly expected to be a direct impact of pursuing the Super project and thus should be included Allocation of charges for the use of excess agglomerator capacity – As this was accounted for already as part of the evaluation criteria for the Jell-o project this should not be included Team then commenced to apply some of the budgeting concepts discussed in class. First, NPV was calculated using the NPV function in Excel - approximately $419,000. In this calculation we found NPV to be a positive number thus indicating that the Super Project investment should be pursued by General Foods. The team also chose to calculate IRR as another method of evaluating the Super Project. Again

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