Brainstorming Ideas: Reduce the Rate of Cost for the Input Used to Produce the Output

Use the same type of Input and the same activities, but pay less for the unit of Input employed in producing the Output. A reduction in rate is equivalent to a reduction in the number of Inputs for the same ICD. For example, if a person who makes $10 per hour could produce the same amount of Output as a person making $20 an hour, the substitution of the $10 person for the $20 person in the process would be equivalent to cutting the number of people required to do the work by 50%.

G. Expand in-house ICDs to reduce rate on purchased ICDs:

Sometimes it is better for the company to increase the activities (ICDs) inside the company in order to reduce the effective rate paid on purchased ICDs. This occurs when the price on purchased ICDs is high enough to allow the company to make a return on its investment by producing the same ICDs in-house rather than purchasing them from third parties.

Make rather than buy ICDs

No.	Industry SIC	Year	Notes
1	2000	1991	Gold Mine Natural Food is stepping up a program to collect used boxes from health-food retailers. It intends to recycle the boxes by using them itself, at a savings of $500-600 a week.
2	2273	1996	The current focus of capital spending has thus been towards continuous filament processing of pre-dyed yarns, which eliminates reliance on spinning mills. Shaw has adequate continuous filament processing to take advantage of these developments.
3	3535	1986	Frost Inc. formulated its own automation plan for about a third of the cost of outside proposals. Automation has cut prices by 30% while lifting gross margins to a respectable 35%. Sales per employee are up nearly 50%.
4	3711	2008	Toyota's advantage in U.S. labor costs is disappearing as its plants age and Detroit cuts back. To offset rising wages, Toyota is pushing plants to get even leaner. The company has set an on-site medical center at its San Antonio factory as an experiment in cutting health-care costs. Also, new hires will reach top wage after five years instead of three. And starting wage in the new Mississippi plant will be lower than Toyota's traditional $16/hr.
5	4899	2005	Comcast Corp. is forming its own nationwide fiber network so it won't have to rely entirely on satellites to beam TV signals among its local cable systems. Universities are taking lines at discount prices to form their own data sharing networks. Some banks, trading firms and large corporations have increased their interest in buying and maintaining their own fiber lines so they can save money and have more control over their connections. Buyers can get dark fiber lines on the secondary market for $35 a mile even though the average price is close to $350 to $400. A buyer is likely to pay $750 to $1,000 a mile to lease a desirable route down from $1,500 to $2,000 a mile. New buyers are smaller phone and Internet companies that have decided its cheaper to own their lines than to rent capacity on a network operation's system.
6	5211	1997	Menards is barely 1/5 the size of Home Depot, so it doesn't enjoy the purchasing discounts HD does. But Menard invested in a manufacturing facility that produces Menards' own products, cutting about 10% off the cost of going through a supplier.
7	7372	2006	As oil prices soar, some of the nation's biggest energy consumers are revamping their operations to shrink energy bills. Microsoft Corp. just installed 2,288 tiles of solar electric paneling at its Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View, CA, that can supply up to 15% of the campus' energy needs. That's important since California can experience blackouts in the summer.

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