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Accelerating Removal of Variation
Rob drove along the straight and thought about the day. He had calculated
what dropping one person per crew would do, plus cancelling his gradu-
ate engineers program as well as reducing two maintenance staff. The
result was about a $350,000 reduction in cost per month out of his budget
of $44million per month. The problem was that wasn’t anywhere near
enough.
Out of the $44 million potroom costs, $27 million was electricity and
$8 million was carbon. Another $3 million was maintenance materials—
essentials for pot reconstruction and for the production machinery. There
was the problem in a nutshell. There ...