The Business Book

300

EVERY GAIN THROUGH THE

ELIMINATION OF WASTE IS

GOLD IN THE MINE

JURAN’S PRODUCTION IDEAL

Fund price cuts,

which will hopefully

boost sales.

Or improve profit

margins, which can

be used to finance

new product

development.

Every gain through the elimination

of waste is gold in the mine.

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

Waste reduction

KEY DATES

1969 The Spittelau incineration

plant in Vienna opens to burn

trash collected from the city.

The award-winning design

means that the energy created

can be used to provide hot

water to a local hospital.

1931 Walter Shewhart

summarizes his work on

process quality control at

Western Electric in his book

Economic Control of Quality

of Manufactured Product.

1994 In The Empty Raincoat,

Charles Handy predicts the

rise of telecommuting,

whereby employees work from

home to reduce office space.

1999 Salesforce.com and

Google develop cloud

computing. This foregoes the

need to run expensive servers

on which to store their data.

Lower unit costs can help a company grow because

lower costs can be used to either:

Efficiency gains created from cutting waste cause

average unit costs to fall.

Reducing waste increases efficiency by improving

the productivity of capital and labor.