Impulses for Growth and Employment through Profitable Savings in ...

ment with an average payback of twelve
months. About a third of the one-time investment
consists of internal and external
personnel costs for task development and
implementation, the other two-thirds consist
of equipment expenditures.
Other management consultancies have
similar experiences with comparable
methods. Specific engineering methods
and technologies herald further potentials 3 .
Barriers
With such a potential the question arises:
Why isn’t it already being harvested to the
greatest possible extent by individual
companies within a market economy?
General practice shows that “nobody is
perfect”, not even industry. No company
exists that is and stays fully rationalised.
Today, by no means all motivation and
performance potentials with respect to
personnel have been tapped. Major optimisation
surges of the past (quality management,
logistics optimisation, outsourcing,
business process engineering) could
for the most part have been implemented
years earlier. But a critical mass of awareness,
methods and qualified multipliers
was necessary for the potentials to be
tapped on a large scale.
Having said this it is not quite as astonishing
that potentials for profitable dematerialization
have not yet been fully tapped.
Everyday business practice shows a series
of concrete structural barriers standing
in the way of profitable dematerialization:
• Business decision-makers are often
not aware of the full costs that accrue
with respect to manufacturing in terms
of material losses 4 and with respect to
product use in terms of material consumption.
This is one reason that
common accounting systems either do
not display or incompletely display
these costs.
3 Cf. for example Fachverband Elektrische Antriebe
im Zentralverband Elektrotechnik- und Elektronikindustrie
(ZVEI) e.V. (ed.), Energiesparen mit elektrischen
Antrieben – Einsparpotenziale in Milliardenhöhe,
Frankfurt 1999.
4 In particular for rejects, effluents and waste
• Cost reduction is most commonly associated
with the reduction of personnel
costs and less commonly with a
reduction of material throughput costs.
In many cases, this is the reason why
material costs are not reduced as consistently
as personnel costs. In individual
cases this goes as far as cutting
the budget for personnel so stringently
that insufficient capacities remain for
other cost reduction measures.
• Incentives for a company do not automatically
lead to equivalent incentives
for company decision-makers. Purchasing
departments, for instance, are
often controlled in accordance with unit
prices rather than the more indicative
life cycle costs of equipment and material
purchased. In this way, solutions
prevail on a supra-company basis that
are not always the most economical.
The German Electrical and Electronic
Manufacturers’ Association (ZVEI) estimates
that the introduction of appropriate
electric engines with the most
economical life cycle within German
industry would lead to billions of savings.
• Company personnel do not consistently
possess the know-how for tapping
the full potential for profitable dematerialization.
While the required
methods are not highly complex they
are demanding and do not yet belong
to the standard curriculum of university
and in-house training.
• Business access to know-how and
capital for implementing the potentials
via contracting or other risk-benefitsharing
schemes with third parties is
hampered by lacking modularization of
production systems as well as missing
practicable standards for respective
contracts and measuring procedures.
However, most of these barriers can be
removed by economic policy action in conjunction
with single-company measures.
By supporting respective media reports
the government can foster an awareness
for the extent of material throughput costs
and ways of influencing them. It can ac-
2