Leonard: After talking with I'm not so some other managers at a recent industrial convention. sure that waste by itself is the issue. They talked about activity-based management, activity- based costing, and continuous improvement. They mentioned the use of something called "activ- ity drivers" to assign overhead. They claimed that these new procedures can help to produce more efficiency in manufacturing, better control of overhead, and more accurate product cost- ing. A big deal was made of eliminating activities that added no value. Maybe our bids are too high because these other firms have found to decrease their and increase ways overhead costs to the accuracy of their product costing.