The study of employee arrangement for plastic injection-molding factory by using activity-based costing

As the global consumer electronic products market expanding rapidly, more than 50％ of parts are from the plastic injection-molding industry. That factories in this industry have reached highly-automated production accompanies the raise of proportion of the machinery cost. In particular, in the meager-profit OEM factory, the employee arrangement is the only way to reduce the cost. Besides, factories have turned their production orientation to the market orientation. However, it is difficult to know the market demand well. Therefore, an effective employee arrangement is able to provide an more flexible human resources allocation and reduce the production cost.
This research made a use of eM-Plant software to stimulate the production progress to gather operation information and provided a more precise cost calculated by activity-based costing system to analyze the cost structure of batch production for the plastic injection-molding factory. Further, unreasonable operations and inappropriate human resources allocation were addressed. After analyzing the difference from the former cost structure and the improved one, we can find the cost reduced and therefore the profit increased.
After knowing the cost structure and simulation based on the information from activity-based costing system, the research outcome found main costs are from the material（86％）and unit-level labor cost（6％）。In order to make more appropriate human resources allocation, three strategies from opinion of salaries and the utility of employees are proposed to achieve economic benefits：payment improvement and reallocation for insufficient utility employees. The cost after strategies implemented reveals that under the best strategy there is an 1.8％ decrease for every products. The objective of this research is achieved.