Raw Excluded

To: Engagement Manager  
From: Junior Consultant  
Subject: TTW composing-room costs: run targeted tests to find savings  

Composition is the largest production cost—roughly 40% of hardback cost and 50–55% of paperback cost—and TTW is uncompetitive on simple work. TTW does not yet know whether its composing-room costs are excessive. The question is what should be done next.

TTW should run targeted tests to establish where composing-room savings exist.

## Recommended actions

1. **Pilot simplified quality-control checks on inexpensive titles.**
   - Every title currently passes through essentially the same quality-control stages, whether a complex reference book or a simple novel.
   - Select representative inexpensive titles and test fewer or differently timed checks.
   - Measure the effect on quality and customers.
   - The saving could reach 10% of total composing cost.

2. **Conduct a methods study to close the productivity gap.**
   - TTW’s measured productivity trails the benchmark by 20–50%.
   - The department is overloaded, and manual composition is especially short of capacity.
   - A separate methods study can identify further productivity improvements.

3. **Use comparisons with three other printers as context, not proof.**
   - The comparisons can help frame the findings.
   - A simple comparison alone is unlikely to settle whether TTW’s costs are excessive.

**Decision needed:** approve the pilot scope and the methods-study brief. Management is willing to investigate; George Kennedy is willing to test whether some stages can be removed and why productivity trails the benchmark.

**Omitted:** the Aylesbury setting, the two-week fieldwork narrative, the general desire to understand causes, the names of the other interviewees, and operating/labor symptoms—late jobs, overtime more than 50% over budget, pay below local market rates, hiring and retention difficulties, the loss of two employees, and the union claim—because they do not directly support the recommended tests.