By Jim Fitch
Practicing Oil Analysis Magazine
Modern organizations call it raising the corporate IQ. Most of us have seen statistics on the lifetime financial returns of a college education. When it comes to education, a penny saved is not a penny earned, but rather green dollars forfeited – hundreds of them, all for the quest of a penny.
When it comes to lubrication and oil analysis, the unskilled and untrained workforce is deceivingly costly. These are the costs that go undiagnosed and unrecognized. What’s below the water’s surface and out of management’s view often has iceberg-like proportions.
So why does an organization look to the maintenance payroll to make cuts in the name of survival and prosperity? For one, it’s conspicuous, like the iceberg’s tip. It is also indirect labor that is perceived as easier to sacrifice. Managers often take a Parkinson’s Law view of indirect labor, “the manpower it takes to do a job is directly proportional to the manpower available to do the job.”