Where are we spending more without getting more?

Most operations measure labor, downtime, scrap, utilization, maintenance, material, throughput, and other major sources of cost. Those measurements make consumption visible, but they do not necessarily explain why the system requires more resources than expected to produce the same outcome.

The location where the cost appears may not be the location where the cost is created.

Equipment behavior, scheduling, material availability, maintenance, quality, staffing, demand, and process conditions can interact across the operation so that inefficiency emerges somewhere far removed from its initiating cause.

This Hard Case follows an operating-cost problem through ruwbi's six-step method to determine what was actually consuming the additional time, capacity, material, labor, or money.