The Hidden Cost of Duplicate Work

The Hidden Cost of Duplicate Work

Back in the 1990s, I was the Quality Assurance Manager for a large canning company. I remember trying to explain something to our manufacturing managers that made perfect sense to me and apparently sounded like fuzzy math to everyone else.

We were talking about the cost of making a mistake.

If we produced something incorrectly, everyone understood the obvious costs. We had wasted material, spent labor and machine time producing something we couldn’t sell, and depending on the problem, might have had to scrap the product entirely.

Then we had to make it again.

Those costs were easy to understand because we could see them.

But I kept asking another question: what about the product we didn’t make because we were busy remaking the one we got wrong?

That’s usually when I started getting the looks.

The argument was that we had already accounted for the mistake. We knew what the bad product cost, and we knew what it cost to replace it. What else was there to calculate?

A lot, actually. The problem was that we were measuring what happened. I was asking about what didn’t happen. And things that never happen can be remarkably expensive.

Where Is Unit 10?

Imagine a machine that has enough capacity to produce ten units during a shift. If everything goes correctly, production looks like this:

1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7 — 8 — 9 — 10

Ten production slots. Ten good units.

Now imagine Unit 5 is defective and has to be scrapped. We still need Unit 5, so we make it again. Now our production looks like this:

1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — X — 5 — 6 — 7 — 8 — 9

Look at the end of the line. Where is Unit 10?

It was never made. We used one of our ten production opportunities making the defective product, then used another replacing it.

Everyone can see the defective Unit 5. Accounting can calculate the material that went into it, the labor, the overhead, the scrap, and what it cost to produce the replacement. But Unit 10 is different. There’s no scrap ticket for it, no rework report, no defective Unit 10 sitting somewhere on the production floor. Unit 10 simply doesn’t exist. The capacity that would have produced it was consumed correcting something we had already done.

That’s the part that’s easy to miss.

Now, to be fair, a missing unit doesn’t automatically mean the company lost a sale. Maybe there was additional capacity available tomorrow. Maybe demand was only nine units. Maybe the schedule had enough flexibility to absorb the loss.

But if the operation is running near capacity, Unit 10 has to show up somewhere. Maybe we run overtime to produce it. Maybe another job gets pushed back. Maybe an order ships late. Maybe tomorrow’s schedule absorbs today’s shortage.

The cost doesn’t disappear simply because it isn’t sitting in the scrap bin. It moves.

We Don’t Have Time for Maintenance

There was another sentence I heard countless times during my manufacturing career: “We don’t have time for preventive maintenance. We need to make product.”

I understood the pressure behind it. If preventive maintenance requires taking a line down for several hours, those hours are easy to see — everyone knows exactly how much product could have been produced while that equipment was stopped. Production is already behind. Orders need to ship. Customers are waiting.

So we skip the maintenance.

And here’s what makes that decision particularly dangerous: usually, nothing happens. The machine keeps running. We just gained several hours of production.

The next time preventive maintenance comes around, we’re still busy. We skipped it last time and nothing happened, so maybe we can skip it again. Once again, the machine keeps running. The decision appears to have been correct.

Until it isn’t.

Then, somehow, the machine never seems to break during the production run nobody cares about. It happens right in the middle of the run that absolutely has to get out the door. Now the line isn’t down for a few scheduled hours — nobody knows how long it’s going to be down. Maintenance has to determine what failed: maybe tooling broke, maybe a component failed, maybe someone has to track down a replacement part. Meanwhile, depending on the process, there may be costly material sitting on the line, some of it already processed far enough that it can’t simply go back into inventory — it may have to be scrapped just to clear the equipment so maintenance can reach the problem.

Then we make the repair. We clean up. We reset the equipment. We restart the process. Quality may need to verify everything is operating correctly again. Production starts moving. Everyone is relieved. We’re running again.

But look at what we bought in exchange for the few hours of preventive maintenance we decided we didn’t have time to perform. We may have bought emergency maintenance, damaged equipment, scrapped material, lost production, idle labor, schedule disruption, restart time, additional quality checks, overtime, and potentially late orders. And somewhere at the end of the production schedule are more Unit 10s — products we never made while we were dealing with a failure that might have been prevented.

The decision wasn’t really between maintenance and production. It was between planned capacity today and potentially much greater unplanned capacity tomorrow. That distinction matters.

Busy Does Not Always Mean Productive

One reason duplicate work is so difficult to recognize is that it usually doesn’t look like waste. It looks like work.

The maintenance technician repairing the broken machine is working. The production team cleaning up the line is working. The operator remaking Unit 5 is working. Everyone may be extremely busy.

That’s precisely what makes this kind of waste dangerous. If someone is standing around doing nothing, we notice. But when someone is working hard on something that didn’t need to happen, we often call it productivity. Those are not the same thing.

The question isn’t simply whether people are working. The question is whether their work is creating new value or consuming capacity recovering value we already should have created. That distinction applies far beyond a manufacturing floor.

The Million-Square-Foot Walk

The canning company where I worked was enormous — roughly one million square feet inside. That changes the meaning of the phrase “Can you go take care of something?”

You didn’t just walk over to the next office. If someone asked me to handle a problem on the other side of the facility, I had to think about what I would need when I got there. What tools do I need? Do I have everything? Because if I forgot something, it might mean another 10- or 15-minute trip. So I would gather what I needed and start walking. In some facilities, you had another problem too — multiple floors, with the elevator reserved for moving product, so you’re taking the stairs.

I had a particular pet peeve that occasionally got me into trouble with managers. A manager would give me something to do. I would tell them I would take care of it as soon as I finished another assignment they had already given me. Eventually, I would finish the first task, gather what I needed for the next one, and make my way across the facility.

Then I would get there. Someone had already done it.

I would lose it. Sometimes I would go back to the manager and tell them they had wasted my time. Occasionally I was reminded that I worked for them. They were correct. But that didn’t change the process — I still had to walk back across the building, put away the tools I had gathered, and move on to the next thing I should have been doing.

The organization had solved the original problem. But it was still consuming resources because nobody had closed the communication loop. That’s another hidden cost of duplicate work: a completed task can still consume resources if everyone assigned to it doesn’t know it’s complete.

Today, the building may not be a million square feet. The employee might never leave their desk. But the problem hasn’t disappeared. Someone spends three hours researching an issue another employee already researched. Two departments independently create essentially the same spreadsheet. Someone prepares a report without knowing another person already built it. Information gets entered into one system and then manually entered into another. A team solves a problem another department solved six months ago, but nobody documented what they did.

Technology has changed the distance. It hasn’t eliminated the walk across the million-square-foot building.

The Work You Didn’t Do

This is where I think our normal understanding of duplicate work falls short.

If an employee spends three hours doing something that has already been done, we can calculate those three hours. But that’s only the visible cost. What was that employee supposed to accomplish during those three hours? That work didn’t happen. Maybe it gets pushed until tomorrow. Maybe someone else picks it up. Maybe it requires overtime. Maybe another deadline slips. Or maybe nobody notices it at all.

There is no report showing the project that would have moved forward if those three hours had been available. Just like Unit 10, it never existed.

That’s why I think the true cost of duplicate work is much larger than most organizations realize. Duplicate work doesn’t simply consume resources — it consumes opportunity.

When Entire Organizations Duplicate Work

This becomes even more complicated in the nonprofit world.

There are thousands of organizations doing important work, often with very limited resources. Sometimes two organizations serve similar populations or provide similar services. That doesn’t automatically mean one of them shouldn’t exist — geography matters, capacity matters, different approaches matter, specialization matters. Sometimes redundancy is valuable.

But sometimes we build essentially the same capability more than once. And every capability requires resources — staff, technology, insurance, accounting, fundraising, marketing, facilities, administration, leadership, systems, and donor relationships. Two organizations can both be doing excellent work and still be consuming community resources maintaining parallel infrastructures.

Then something else happens. Both organizations may approach many of the same foundations, corporations, and individual donors for support. Now we’re not simply duplicating the service — we’re also using resources to compete for the resources required to maintain the duplication.

Again, the visible numbers are relatively easy to find. We can look at each organization’s budget. We can see how many people they served. We can see what programs they operate. The harder question is the same one I was asking manufacturing managers decades ago: where is Unit 10? What could the community have accomplished with the capacity being consumed by duplication? That’s much harder to put on a financial statement.

Duplication Isn’t Automatically Bad

There is an important distinction here. Efficiency is not the same thing as eliminating every duplicate.

Manufacturing companies intentionally maintain backup equipment. Organizations cross-train employees so more than one person can perform an important job. Technology systems have redundancy because failure is expensive. Communities may need multiple organizations providing similar services because one organization could never handle the demand.

Sometimes duplication creates resilience. Sometimes competition creates better solutions. Sometimes two organizations that appear similar from the outside are serving very different needs.

The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate duplication at all costs. The goal should be to recognize its cost and make it intentional. If we’re going to spend two units of capacity accomplishing something, we should understand why we’re doing it. The danger is accidental duplication — that’s when nobody realizes we’re paying twice.

The Costs That Don’t Send Invoices

Organizations are usually pretty good at tracking expenses. Payroll sends an invoice of sorts every two weeks. Vendors send invoices. Utilities send bills. Scrapped material can be counted. Overtime appears on payroll reports.

But lost capacity doesn’t send an invoice. Neither does the report that never got written because someone spent the afternoon recreating another report. The product that wasn’t manufactured doesn’t appear in the scrap total. The project that wasn’t started because the team was fixing yesterday’s mistake doesn’t appear as an expense. The family that wasn’t served because two organizations were using limited resources maintaining overlapping infrastructure doesn’t appear on anyone’s financial statement.

Those costs are harder to see precisely because nothing happened. And yet organizations experience the consequences every day: “We need more people.” “We need more money.” “We don’t have enough time.” “We’re at capacity.” “We can’t keep up.”

Sometimes those statements are absolutely true — demand really does exceed resources. But before automatically adding more resources, I think leaders should also ask where their existing capacity is going. How much time is spent correcting work? How much is spent repeating work? How much is spent recovering from things we chose not to prevent? How often do two people work on the same problem without knowing it? How much organizational capacity is committed to maintaining something that already exists somewhere else?

These questions don’t always produce comfortable answers. But neither did my question about Unit 10.

The Hidden Cost

When we made a bad product all those years ago, everyone could see it. The defective product was right there. When we remade it, everyone could see that too.

What was harder to see was the empty production slot at the end of the shift. Nothing was sitting there. There was nothing to count, nothing to scrap, nothing to put on a report. But something had still been lost: capacity, opportunity, the ability to do the next thing.

That’s why the cost of duplicate work isn’t simply what we spend doing something twice. It’s also the value of what we could not do because our people, equipment, money, or time were busy doing something we had already done.

Every time we repeat work, we can calculate at least some of what the repetition cost us. What is much harder to calculate is the work we never completed because our resources were busy doing something twice.

That’s the hidden cost of duplicate work.