Workload fluctuates week to week, so fixed labor costs eat margins through overtime, idle time, or longer lead times. The solution is a flexible labor pool that scales with demand, treating labor like inventory to expose and fix hidden operational problems.
You know, it's fundamentally impossible for you to optimize your labor cost with purely a fixed labor model. You're always going to have more work some weeks and then less work other weeks. And what are your alternatives? You either work overtime, which can eat into your margins, or you try to VTO people off. Maybe you ask for people who might want to lay off, or, you know, you'll pay operators even if you don't have that volume. Both of those things impact your cost or, you know, they're pushing lead times out. So not only is it low-hanging fruit, but as you build out your labor pool, as you continue to invest in that labor pool, as you're bringing them in and out of your operation as you need, it starts revealing other opportunities. Within your operations. So that, that whole analogy of inventory being a water level, and as you lower inventory, those rocks and those challenges start presenting yourself. We see that all the time with the labor aspect in a business as well. So once you solve the labor piece and once you have the flexibility and agility to sort of use that anywhere in your operation, now you can start You've, you've removed labor as a constraint, and that's when you can start solving some of the higher-level issues.
