Case Study: 
Finding Free Lunches: New Ways to Measure and Manage Productivity
By: Del Jones & Shlomo Maital

Abstract:
There are no free lunches, Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman once said. He meant that every time we consume real resources, there is an economic cost; someone always provides and pays for the corned beef on rye, hold the mustard.

But growing numbers of companies are using an economic concept known as total factor productivity (TFP), or multi-factor productivity, to identify and capture enormous free lunches. They do this by squeezing more production and sales out of existing resources.

The beauty is, when they succeed the results go directly to the bottom line. In times of global deflation, when falling prices put severe pressure on profits and profit margins, TFP free-lunch gains are positively life saving. This case study discusses measuring productivity in order to maximize outputs.