Building the cost accounting system for plastic injection molds using the activity based costing method

The goal of this paper is to construct a production costing system that can be useful both to accurately calculate the cost of a plastic injection mold and to make decisions about effective management and production planning in a plastic injection mold making plant. The plastic injection mold production process is based on a scheduled production plan. Produced molds differ from each other and usually only a single specimen per mold is produced. In such a production system, the activity-based costing system will be used in order to calculate the most accurate mold costs including the factory overhead and the direct costs shared by the molds produced, which cannot be determined easily. The first part of this paper presents the plastic injection mold in detail. The second part presents the activity-based costing system and explains its application to the calculation of the cost of plastic injection mold. The paper will be concluded following the presentation of a numerical example in the third part. m