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Switchboard Manufacturer Climbs into the Black

While senior management held conflicting views about the cause of declining profitability, a representative sample of invoices helped pinpoint the problem in a matter of minutes

Financial statements—emerging four months after the end of the financial year—only confirmed what was already known: the business was losing ground and fast.

The cause of the decline was hard to pinpoint. Everybody in the place, ranging from the CEO to the office assistant, seemed to have a different point of view.

The production manager put the problem down to the new computer system installed at great expense 18 months ...

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