Patterns of Cost Reduction

I was fortunate to work for some years with McKinsey and Company. As an alumnus of that organization, I receive regularly the McKinsey Quarterly. Every once in awhile, the McKinsey Quarterly emails a feature called Chart Focus. A couple of weeks ago, I received one of these Chart Focus emails where McKinsey was talking about making field teams more productive. The firm has apparently done a good deal of work with large field service teams, such as technicians who install telephone lines or cable T.V. boxes, for example. The chart described the differences in productivity before and after the work that improved the performance of these field service workers.

The chart lists a set of measures that a client company used to calculate their field teams’ productivity. Against each of these measures, McKinsey noted cost saving approaches that the company had used to improve productivity. Then the chart showed the improvement in productivity that the cost reduction efforts produced. Here are a few of those measures and the cost saving efforts that improved them.

1. Measure: Daily target for service bookings
Cost Improvement Effort: Load more points than will be completed

2. Measure: Some technicians assigned to tasks other than calls
Cost Improvement Effort: Technician schedule measured more carefully, reducing or eliminating time spent on other tasks

3. Measure: Full load not booked to allow for some rescheduling
Cost Improvement Effort: Load appropriate levels of technicians and points

4. Measure: Unfilled quota caused by no rebalancing among work zones
Cost Improvement Effort: Rebalance schedule to limit amount of unfilled quota

This is just a partial list of those measures and efforts shown in the chart.

Over the last several years we have looked at several thousand cost reduction efforts like these in order to categorize patterns in cost reduction. At the highest level we found four patterns in cost reduction:
1) reduce the rate of the cost input;
2) reduce inputs not producing output;
3) reduce unique cost driving activities in processes;
4) spread unique cost driving activities over new product output.

All four of the examples in the McKinsey Chart Focus fall into the second of our categories, reducing inputs not producing output. My guess is that the study teams actually use some of the other three cost reduction approaches as well.