Reduce the Units of Input Not Producing Output

Reduce units of Input (I) available but not producing Intermediate Cost Drivers
(ICDs). This action makes Input levels more directly variable with the quantity of the ICD by reducing the amount of the available Input that is wasted or idle. For example, an employee (I) might produce one subassembly (ICD) per day. During that day, the employee spends a total of one hour waiting for parts for the subassembly. If the Company could eliminate that one lost hour of the employee's work day by providing parts in a more timely manner, the Company could reduce the number of employees (I) needed to produce the same subassembly (ICD) by 1/8th.

A. Assist Input in increasing ICDs.

Train employees in efficiency

The company may incur costs to train employees in the expectation that these expenses will result in even greater cost savings through better efficiency.

No.	Industry SIC	Year	Notes
1	0	2003	When employees feel psychologically safe, they engage in learning behavior–they ask questions, seek feedback, experiment, reflect on results, and discuss errors or unexpected outcomes openly. Leaders must move quickly to implement promising ideas.
2	2273	1996	Shaw was the first to develop a formal sales training program, and essentially professionalized the carpet sales profession. The other mills have begun to develop this approach, and have hired Shaw sales representatives away.
3	3400	2008	Van Meter Industrial Inc. and other employee-owned companies are setting up education committees to teach their employees what each of them can do to raise their stock price and their own net worth. One of Van Meter's employee committees has rolled out a series of campaigns with catch slogans and giveaways to raise awareness of stock ownership and to get workers thinking about how to raise their stock.
4	3576	2004	Beginning in 1992, Cisco outsourced manufacturing responsibilities for its products to partner firms like Solectron and Selestica but maintained its own quality control through digital procedures. It established procedures for quality control that were virtually infallible and then handed those to its partners.
5	4800	2007	Managers can boost productivity amongst in-home service providers by being actively engaged. Productivity is shown to increase when managers ride along to observe and spread best practices.
6	5411	1990	Wegman's recruits young employees from disadvantaged communities, provides them with mentors, and offers them an opportunity for a full college scholarship.
7	7372	2008	Outstart, an online technologies provider, allows ExactTarget's sales force to post and answer questions about the software company's products and procedures. To use SellingEdge, employees email their questions to a particular email address and their questions get posted automatically on the site. Another sales rep or sales-support staffer can then provide answers. Employees can subscribe to get email alerts every time a new question is posted. Reps can rate each other's answers and questions as well and flag inaccuracies.
8	8071	2006	Hospitals are moving to cut dangerous lab errors through improved specimen collection and efficiency. One of the most persistent problems is poor quality of specimens. In cancer diagnoses, the biopsies have high error rates, where tumor cells might not be extracted, and the lab will make a diagnosis on what it gets. In 2004, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center developed a new, more rigorous process for collecting the specimens, including checklists for gynecologists to follow that map out correct procedures; both false positives and negatives have been reduced.

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