(24 Jan 2014, 12:12 am)Adam wrote Yeah, one alternative for the whole Contribution thing is for businesses to look at reducing costs as much as possible to help increase the profitability of them by varying ways such as reducing labour, improving efficiency and so on. You may as well admit it, you are secretly qualified to teach A2 Level Business
Ah yeah, of course it depends on the situation as each business and scenario is different, but in a general sense it is a good approach for a business to adopt. It is certainly interesting to see how the change/removal of one product affects the whole situation of others. To completely contradict all of what I've said, it's probably a lot harder for businesses working in the service sector to use the power of Contribution than businesses of other sectors.
There is/was a quote on the Goahead corporate website, with regard to reducing their costs.
By bulk buying fuel in advance, reducing insurance costs and consolidating depots, their costs are reduced literally overnight.
They can also look at the merging or shortening of some routes too as a way of reducing costs.
The Durham Road corridor is an excellent example of that - passengers are under the impression they have a better service than 20-30years ago, but all that is happened in reality is that GNE have reduced their fixed costs by merging several Chester based routes into one, stopped them running anywhere that isn't on the A167 and axed the Sunderland Road based services which ran to the estates.