The leadership team discovered that over the years, as new products represented a larger amount of annual revenues, newer-generation LEGO sets had become more elaborate while providing less profit in return. Product designers were creating new sets without giving full consideration to the costs of materials or production: this resulted in LEGO dealing with over 11,000 suppliers, as designers often selected their own vendors. Not considering production costs resulted in serious waste. If a designer created a new brick or selected a rare colour, manufacturing would often be left with extra materials or costly resin colours that would never be used again. Inefficiencies were also revealed from the poor organization of LEGO' s plastic-injection molding machines, with each one capable of producing every type of LEGO brick: this required costly retooling and created long downtimes, translating into production facilities only operating at 70 per cent of capacity. Upon producing a finished product, the leadership team traced additional high costs to distribution operations. Logistics represented a web of 26 different providers that shipped products from multi-levelled distribution networks: this created a backlog of orders and inefficiencies in inventory levels. The leadership team continued to uncover damaging business practices at the fmal retail level. Overall, LEGO was spending the same amount of time dealing with thousands of smaller independent stores that represented one-third of revenues as it did with 200 larger chain and big box stores that generated two-thirds of revenues. Smaller stores also added extra costs for LEGO in shipping, labour and inventory, as they often ordered less than a full carton of product. In turn, the disproportionate amount of time with chain and big box stores equalled inaccurate forecasting and inventory shortages that decreased sales.