Building understanding from throughput accounting with productivity and price recovery: case analysis of electronics contract manufacturer

Throughput Accounting (TA) has been analysed within the previous research works through the product mix problems, and it has been concluded that this method provides nearly optimal decisions (as compared to static optimisation methods), and performs significantly better than the other accounting approaches. However, there exists only scarce research related to the implementation and an actual use of TA in the short-term performance measurement context. In this paper, we present the results from electronics contract manufacturing company, and analyse these through American Productivity Center productivity and price recovery model. The results of the research suggest that productivity improves in the company level within the same phase among price recovery, but in different product groups the situation is diverse (this is caused mostly by product life-cycles and use of software). We also find that the manufacturer is able to benefit from price recovery; direct material prices are changing with sales prices, but the speed of change creates price recovery in nearly all situations, and eventually improves profitability. These findings stress the importance of revenue management; life-cycle phase and used technology of a product group seem to produce different patterns in productivity and price recovery.