Companies that intend to remain competitive understand that the most important factor is their ability to service customers. A lot of emphasis in recent years has been on cost cutting and doing more with less. Keep your efforts focused on this while at the same time building effectiveness.

I often see service levels diminish as a result of cuts. What happens when cuts are made is that remaining people are often asked to do more tasks; some of which they are not well trained for or skilled at. This causes a lot of unintended work to show up later. For example, if an order entry person makes errors, this may force production to go back and ask for clarity about the order. This can be very time consuming and the number of errors can snowball. If the order entry person had been trained for the additional tasks, it may have eliminated the original errors.

“There never seems to be enough time to do it right at first, but there always seems to be time to redo the work later.”

It is common for a manager to get a mandate from above to reduce payroll, or some other cost cutting directive, without first analyzing the overall training or skills gaps. There can be an urgency to reduce the cost without the urgency to bring others up to speed. This causes an “on the job training” cycle that is problematic. The remaining people are happy to have survived the cut, but in a short time they will feel overburdened and underappreciated. This can cause overall production to falter.

Companies that lag in service will see negative consequences. As their customers migrate to suppliers that are in tune with what is truly of value, many will be left wondering where the greatest breakdowns occurred.

Conclusion: Be careful to not get caught up in a “cut our way to prosperity” mentality without first carefully considering the training necessary to get others up to speed.