VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [82]
Sarah cut herself off again. For a second, Amy thought the call had been dropped. Then:
“Amy, I shouldn’t be talking like this.”
“Yes, you should,” Amy insisted. “Now, please, talk to me.”
“Viktor just keeps patching things over. He doesn’t want to fix what I – and a lot of others – see as the problems. He doesn’t want the loop to be efficient.”
“I’m sorry, say that again.”
“He doesn’t want the testing loop to be more efficient or more productive. He wants the loop to turn out accurate data. He wants dependable, verifiable results. He wants the loop to be fully utilized. But he wants the loop to be only as efficient as it needs to be.”
“Why is that?” Amy asked her.
“Because Viktor thinks that if the loop is more efficient, we’ll make less money.”
“Huh?”
“Amy, you have to protect me on this.”
“And I will. Keep talking.”
“The vast majority of our projects are billed on an hourly basis,” said Sarah.
“Right. Like lawyers.”
“So every working minute is logged against a project and a client account. Viktor thinks that if the loop is more efficient, there will be fewer billable minutes, therefore monthly billings will go down, and we’ll be less profitable. So anytime that anyone talks about improving the loop, Viktor starts to sing his standard opera about quality, and dependability, and why all the tests we do are so vital, why the exhaustive testing and retesting inside the loop is essential to predictable results, and priceless experience of the analysts, and the ingenuity of the chemists, and on and on.”
As Amy was absorbing this, the thought crept coldly across her mind that indeed Viktor might have a valid point. And if Viktor was right about lower billings, in a year when she was on the line to deliver higher earnings to Nigel Furst and Winner …
“The only reason Viktor allowed LSS to reduce the number of steps in sample prep,” Sarah was saying, “is because the time of those technicians is not billable to the client; they’re overhead. The same with clerical staff, which is why he allowed report formats to be standardized.”
“But wait, Sarah, those are real savings, aren’t they? And don’t those savings trickle to the bottom line?” asked Amy.
“What savings? We still have the same headcount, the same number of staff!” said Sarah. “Expenses have not gone down, and we’re not bringing in more accounts or more business. By the way, that mini-factory that Viktor wanted? When we send professional staff to other locations, their travel time – if it’s billable at all – is charged at half the normal rate. Viktor wants to keep the analysts and chemists in Rockville as much as possible, so that they stay fully billable.”
Listening to this, Amy was struck by how much it made sense. She knew that she would not be able to disagree with either point of view – with Sarah for wanting to resolve the issues that caused her insomnia, or with Viktor for supporting a system that was no doubt wasteful and highly inefficient, yet time-tested, functional, and profitable.
“So you should not expect Victor to be a Lean champion,” Sarah said. “He may support Six Sigma and quality improvement, as long as it doesn’t interfere with billings. But not Lean. And that is why he has allowed, and even encouraged, the Lean Greenies to take over.”
Amy snapped back from her own thoughts. “The who?”
“The Lean Greenies. That’s what they call themselves. They’ve kind of hijacked LSS here in a political sense, with Viktor’s tacit approval, and they will only consider improvement projects that have a strong environmental tie-in. Like reducing paper consumption and recycling toner cartridges. If you suggest something to improve one of the lab processes, the first thing they ask is, ‘What does that have to do with saving the environment?’ For next year, they’re talking about replacing all the windows in the building to conserve energy. Viktor thinks it’s great, thinks it’ll make for good public relations. A nice fluffy story in a magazine. I say, screw the PR,