Total Insurance, Inc. (TII) is an instructional case to expand students’ understanding of potential benefits of ABC beyond traditional manufacturing applications rather than as a technical ABC application exercise.  It does not require complex calculations, yet it allows instructors to discuss why companies may adopt some ABC concepts and demonstrates the process by which they create and develop the information to build the system.  Jack White was the CEO of TII, a successful independent insurer.  Several major insurance providers, such as Travelers, Erie, and The Hartford, rely on independent agents around the nation to sell and service their policies.  The company acted like a broker between the insurance providers and the customers, but it is truly an agent of the insurance provider in each transaction.  The company handled $100 million in premium volume, mostly from commercial insurance ($86 million) with very different apparent performances from their sales force teams. The teams of one or two sales producers had one to five other employees and drew differently from the common resources of the firm. He was having trouble distinguishing which of his sales teams were contributing most to his bottom line.  He particularly needed this information in order to help the sales teams to improve their own productivity.  White, recalling an accounting course he had taken in his Executive MBA program, decided to investigate the ability of ABC analysis, as applied in that course toward evaluating customers, to gather data on cost drivers and resource use to determine the productivity of his sales teams.

Although yeast cannot normally incorporate exogenous deoxythymidine 5'monophosphate (dTMP) into deoxyribonucleic acid, mutants able to do so have been isolated. We have characterized a recessive suppressor of dTMP uptake (sotl) that prevents strains carrying either tupi, tup2, or tup4 from growing on selective medium. The sotl mutation maps between radl and the centromere of chromosome XVI, and is unlinked to any of the tup mutations. The sotl mutation does not suppress the other pleiotropic effects of the tupl mutant, notably the lack of mating of tupl MATa strains. The sotl mutation specifically blocks the uptake of dTMP into tup strains. After growing a sotl strain in medium containing [3H]dTMP, we showed that the medium still contained more than 90% of the original [3H]dTMP and that this medium could support the incorporation of [3H]dTMP by a tup2 strain. Therefore, sotl strains do not degrade dTMP in the medium. The sotl mutation had no effect on the uptake of other nutrients essential for growth, including several amino acids, adenine, and uracil.