A WIP-challenged Industry --Dickeson

Going With Our Guts

Still, we've continued our cultural commitment to tracking job costs, even though we'd pretty much abandoned them for sales and marketing. We replaced them with "gut feel" and no reliable statistical system at all for operating decision support. Why do we continue?

You see, good buddies, NAPL, R&E, PIA, GATF, local associations, printing management information system suppliers and old-time consultants hang on to tradition like Rev Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof." They scratch their beards and sagely ask, "Do you really know your costs?" That intimidates us. We don't know, and will never know, our "costs." But neither do, nor will they!