Pinching Pennies Is Fashionable More Corporations Look For Small Ways To Improve Bottom Line

Would you care if your car ashtrays weren’t painted? If that tired lettuce leaf no longer graced your airline meal? If the slogan on the protective seal inside cartons of your favorite ice cream wasn’t centered anymore?

American businesses are making changes - often subtle, sometimes seemingly silly - to save millions of dollars. A single minor adjustment can mean less time on an assembly line, fewer workers to pay, a lighter load to ship and, ultimately, a better bottom line.

“Products tend to evolve into what they are,” said Brian Vogel of Product Genesis, a product engineering firm in Boston. “Every once in a while you’ve got to stop and say, ‘Why are we doing it this way?”’

Ford Motor Co. asked the question and realized it could save $11 billion - and build better vehicles - by rethinking how it puts together its cars and trucks.

By using identical parts for different models, Ford can reduce its inventory and ease the transition to new vehicles. Many of the changes announced this month will save only cents per vehicle, but they’ll quickly add up to dollars. For example:

Offering three types of carpeting rather than nine should save an average $1.25 per vehicle. Companywide, that amounts to $8 million to $9 million a year.

Stocking just five kinds of air filters rather than 18 will save 45 cents per vehicle, or $3 million annually.

Installing one type of cigarette lighter instead of the 14 varieties called for now will save 16 cents per car, or $1 million per year.

Using black screws instead of color-matched painted screws on Mustang side mirrors is expected to save $5.40 per vehicle, or $740,000 per year.

Skipping the black paint inside Explorer ashtrays will save 25 cents per vehicle, or $100,000 per year.

“We don’t think about it on a nickel and dime basis. We think about it as re-engineering the way we do our work,” said Chris Vinyard, a Ford spokesman.

Ford devised the changes through an internal review with input from suppliers. But some companies are shelling out big bucks to pinch a few pennies.

Breyers ice cream hired Treistman & Stark Marketing Inc., a Hackensack, N.J., market research company that charges $30,000 to $100,000 per analysis, to examine its half-gallon carton.

The problem was the cellophane freshness sheet inside the carton’s top flap. Each rectangular sheet was stamped with a wordy “pledge of purity” that had to be centered over the block of ice cream.

Joan Treistman licked the problem by replacing the pledge with a repeating Breyers’ leaf pattern and the words “all natural.” The company gets its message across but saves hundreds of thousands of dollars by eliminating the need for precision cellophane trims on the assembly line.

Many changes are so discreet as to go unnoticed.

In 1992, when Delta Airlines dropped the lettuce garnish from its airplane meals, it no longer needed to pay people to wash and trim the lettuce and place a single leaf on each meal tray. It is saving almost $1.5 million a year, said spokesman Bill Berry.

Did Delta hear from lettuce-loving passengers? “I don’t think in that instance I received one negative letter,” Berry said.

Last year, Delta saved $280,000 by shifting its route maps from separate pamphlets stuffed into seat pockets to a four-page section in the in-flight magazine.

For a company with revenues of $12.25 billion, that may seem like peanuts - which it still serves. But combined with other sweeping efforts, the map change helped Delta cut its costs 4 percent last year and record a profit for the first time since 1990.

In some instances, the changes do more than merely save money.

This fall, RCA televisions will come with a folded instruction sheet instead of a 30-page book. It costs a dime to produce, about 20 cents less than the book, and uses less paper and no staples.

And, wonders Vogel of Product Genesis, who would read a 30-page instruction book anyway?

“The problem in a lot of companies is that it’s tough to critique your own work,” Vogel said. “Generally, when you look at (the changes) in retrospect, they appear so obvious. Why would someone have done it the other way?”