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beight difficult) opportunity to reduce labor costs. The client would essentially like to have its own employees look and function like its contractors, but continue to get paid at present rates. In reality, management will need to make wage concessions in order to change present work practices. However, through planned negotiations a scenario can be created which presents a favorable opportunity for your client to begin to replace outside contractors with its own Craftsmen. There are several ways to address the third question of the case, the actual savings that might be achieved. One quick method is to assume that these changes would bring maintenance costs back in line with industry average. Utilizing the cost benchmark mentioned earlier, one could assume costs could be reduced to $24MM/ = $20MM, a $4MM savings. A second, and more detailed, method would be to take the extreme scenario where the client’s Craftsmen is paid its present rate, but is made as efficient as the contractor’s Craftsmen. In this case, you begin with the present level of 200 client craftsmen who are functioning as 100 equivalent contractor Craftsmen (they’re onehalf as efficient). By improving their efficiency, you are effectively “creating” 100 equivalent contractors. Thus, you are immediately able to replace 100 contractors and save $10MM. This could be taken one step further by assuming you would want to replace all contractors. This would save an additional $ ($4MM existing contractor expense $2MM required to hire additional client craftsmen + $ in contractor supervisors). As noted earlier, in reality, this approach would require wage concessions to the union, so actual savings may be something significantly less. Key takeaways: This case requires the candidate to quickly digest a large amount of anizational issues and then quickly check some ratios to uncover the basic problem (the client workforce is inefficient). Creativity must then be used to structure a remendation that would create a more favorable situation for the client. As in other cases, acceptable solutions need not follow the exact method above nor cover all of the above points.