Retooling Lives: Technological Gains Are Cutting Costs, And Jobs, in Services --- Employment Starts to Plunge As Productivity Increases; Good News for Consumers --- $10 Box, $2 Million Savings
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. -- Like many service companies, Pacific Bell is looking around for big steps toward increased productivity. And it apparently has found one: a $10 circuit box that eventually may save PacBell $2 million a day.</br></br>Here's how: Statewide, the regional telephone unit of Pacific Telesis Group dispatches about 20,000 trucks a day to fix customers' lines. When it finds that the line is broken inside a customer's home or office, it's up to the customer to fix it. Customers usually shoo the worker away and do the repair themselves.</br></br>But PacBell estimates the cost of sending out a truck at $140 -- and wants to pinpoint trouble without dispatching one.</br></br>In an experiment in this suburb north of Los Angeles, PacBell found that the solution was a circuit box linking two existing technologies. PacBell computers continuously send signals to the device, which bounces them back if the outside line is intact. Whenever a line passes that test, the company knows right away that the problem is on the customer's end. Using that gadget, PacBell has slashed its truck dispatches in Santa Clarita by 30%. Multiplied across the company, the daily savings could exceed $2 million.</br></br>Such productivity-enhancing technological gains are accelerating in many service companies. Much of the huge U.S. service sector seems on the verge of an upheaval similar to that which hit farming and manufacturing, where employment plunged for years while production increased steadily. But while the competitiveness of U.S. companies will improve and the cost of services to Americans as consumers will drop, tough times may lie ahead for Americans as employees. PacBell, for instance, won't need anybody to drive the trucks that aren't sent out. Technological advances are now so rapid that companies can shed far more workers than they need to hire to implement the technology or support expanding sales.