Throughput capital budgeting
/Capital budgeting is the process of reviewing requests to purchase fixed assets. There are a number of methods available for doing so; most are based on the concept of changes in cash flows related to the specific asset in question. Using these methods does not necessarily result in the correct investments. Instead, an analysis based on incremental changes in throughput is the best approach. Using this method may result in a decline in the total amount of fixed assets purchased, since it will reveal instances where a prospective investment will not yield an increase in throughput.
Traditional Capital Budgeting
The standard approach to capital budgeting is that management is presented with an unrelated group of requests for investments in fixed assets, to which they apply the following decision process:
Compile the discounted cash flows related to each project.
Adjust the discounted cash flows based on the perceived risk of each project.
Rank the projects based on the amount of positive cash flows to be garnered from each one.
Authorize the projects for investment from the top of the list to the bottom, until available funds run out.
This process has a number of problems, which include:
Managers can be overly optimistic in their cash flow estimates, in order to ensure that their projects are accepted.
The proposals do not describe the impact of an investment on the bottleneck operation within the company.
The proposals are considered individually, and not in terms of how they impact the entire system of production. Thus, the emphasis is only on the localized improvement of specific work centers.
Related AccountingTools Courses
Throughput Capital Budgeting
Basing the capital budgeting decision process on throughput eliminates the preceding set of issues. Instead of cash flow analysis for each separate project, the emphasis should be on improving the amount of total throughput generated by the company. Throughput is revenues minus all variable expenses. Increasing throughput usually requires that the capacity of the bottleneck operation be enhanced in some manner.
If a capital proposal does not improve throughput, then it must instead do one of the following:
Reduce the basic operating expenses of the business
Fulfill a legal requirement
Mitigate a risk
Increase the ability of a workstation upstream from the bottleneck operation to rapidly produce goods, thereby ensuring that a sufficient buffer of inventory is maintained in front of the bottleneck
By using through-based capital budgeting, it is entirely likely that an organization will be able to avoid a number of asset purchases. The following asset requests can be avoided:
Local optimization. A request may be to increase the efficiency of a workstation that does nothing to increase throughput. If so, the investment is wasted, since the company invests funds and receives no return on its investment.
Sprint capacity increase. A request may involve an increase in the capacity of workstations located upstream from the constrained resource. If so, review the request to see if the size of the capacity increase is reasonable, based on the company’s expectations for the amount of sprint capacity needed to recover from a large penetration of the inventory buffer. This review may result in a reduced investment to bring the sprint capacity level up to a reasonable level, rather than a larger capacity level that is unlikely to ever be needed.
Constraint capacity increase. What if a proposed investment is designed to increase the capacity of the constraint? If so, compare the projected amount of incremental new capacity to the projected amount of capacity needed to fulfill throughput requirements. It is entirely possible that the investment will create too much capacity, which merely shifts the constraint to a different location in the company. The appropriate response is to scale back the amount of the investment to only build the required amount of additional capacity.
Expense reduction. If a capital request is not addressed by the preceding review steps, this means the only remaining justification is that the investment will reduce operating expenses. If so, subject the request to an especially detailed review, with a particular emphasis on the assumptions used to prove that expenses will indeed be reduced. Unless there is a high probability of an adequate expense reduction and a low probability of a cost overrun on the investment, reject the request.
Direct Investment in a Bottleneck Operation
There may be cases where management is considering direct investments in a company's bottleneck operation. This is not a minor decision, because bottlenecks have that status for a reason - they are very expensive. The decision to make such a large investment may depend on the perceived level of long-term demand. If the amount of demand is uncertain, the massive step cost incurred by investing more cash in a bottleneck may result in a long-term decline in profitability. Thus, investing to ease the constraint represented by a bottleneck operation should be the target of considerable analysis.