Watershed Moment

Abstract: The record flood that engulfed Cedar Rapids, Iowa in June 2008 damaged or destroyed 700 businesses, including the facilities of Cargill Corn Milling North America. Just four months later, however, the company was back to its previous capacity, thanks to its relian…

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CCM's quick recovery from a devastating flood is very impressive. But the growth in savings due to PDG activities described in the text doesn't seem to match the Figure 2 chart. Per the chart legend, the solid blue bars are cumulative savings, and, as such, would be expected to show the impressive more-than-double growth we see over the '03 to '08 period if previous savings were just maintained from year to year. The blue line with diamond indicators is the annual savings, and it shows a good, but much more modest, growth from about 5 undefined units in '03 to 7 units in '08. The sentence just above the graph would be more accurate if it said:

This cross-functional strategy has been very successful for CCM, which has seen the cumulative savings resulting from PDG activities more than double from fiscal year (FY) 2003 to FY 2008 (see Figure 2).


--L. Charbonneau, 08-10-2009


--Cathy Andrews, 08-10-2009
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