The exponential growth has only seen a direct increase of
shipboard employees. The shore-side support headcount was kept low by achieving certain economies of scale, but more importantly through a gain in efficiency. Although it could be felt that the pressure to keep headcount low is taking a toll, as a manager ex- plains, ‘‘We need to continue to gain efficiency as we grow as an organization, but we also have to realize that the growth also requires additional support behind the growth’’. To increase effi- ciency an emphasis is placed on educating the end user to un- derstand supply chain costs’ structure. Examples of the emphasis of this supply chain education challenge are cases where logistics costs of certain activities can far exceed the replacement cost of a new unit. As a logistics manager explains, one of the current priority in educating a shipboard employee is for them to un- derstand logistics costs, that it can be very costly logistically to land items for repair, and hence it is preferable to replace a $50 electronic item then to repair it. The emphasis is for onboard employees to understand the logistics cost structure, and every day some prog- ress is made in reducing the over the fence approach. One success for the logistics team was to do a bottom up analysis for the freight budget. This allowed for the creation of a clear cost structure, andhence gave visibility throughout the company of logistical costs involved in the managers’ daily decisions.