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Oops, Superdry just lost £2m

At least they're not a pharmaceutical company.

By Martha Gill Published 20 April 2012 16:03

Oops, Photograph: Getty Images.

The owner of Superdry has just lost an estimated £2m to "human error" after someone forgot to carry the one.

A facepalm moment, but they're hardly alone. A 2008 paper from IDC called "Counting the Cost of Employee Misunderstanding" found that the overall cost to US and UK businesses from human error is £18.7 bn. According to the paper, 23 per cent of employees do not understand at least one critical aspect of their job, and on average this costs businesses approximately £315 per employee, per year.

Worryingly, the pharmaceutical industry was cited as one of the top four industries with the greatest level of employee misunderstanding. According to the researchers, it can potentially lose £23.9m each year. The biggest problem for these companies comes from unplanned downtime: more than one-third of companies reported a loss of business as a result. One pharmaceutical company reported a failure of communication that lost them four days on a production line at a cost of £200,000 per day.

In some cases the error is fatal to business: for example, the failure of one company to produce a chemical catalyst in time lead them directly to bankruptcy.

So perhaps Superdry has got off rather lightly after all.

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More from Martha Gill

View the discussion thread.

6 comments

Mon, 2012-06-18 01:26 — Dan Wells (not verified)

Good Business Article! You most definitely can’t keep doing the same things and expect to get different results!!

Nothing could be more true than that!

Tips In Urdu

Mon, 2012-06-18 01:25 — Dan Wells (not verified)

Good Business Article! You most definitely can’t keep doing the same things and expect to get different results!!

Nothing could be more true than that!

Tips In Urdu

Wed, 2012-06-13 17:25 — Andrew Chapman (not verified)

This is quite a good article. Many new questions emerge to the surface, all you need do is to read further information about the issues. Only then one can form a final view on a particular subject. Otherwise everything is seen only in the dimension of cum more black and white. The natural logic of evaluating things before vstavane skrine they were properly cognitively processed is a horrible mistake, made by those less intelligent. People should not throw away their common slovakia sense easily. Anything and everything deserves appropriate time for making judgements.

Wed, 2012-04-25 11:06 — Hallucigenia (not verified)

What they claim is someone made an arithmetical error in the sales forecast, overestimating them by £2.5m. Where in this day and age, in a company of that size, would you find just one accountant involved in the process (including checking/verifying) and would it be done manually?? I'm not sold on this excuse, something more sinister must have happened and this is their soft cover-up.

Mon, 2012-04-23 05:00 — htd (not verified)

On the face of it, the example of the business that went under because it failed to produce a catalyst on time might weaken my argument but then there isn't enough information on this one to label it as a simple case of witless employeesemployees

Sat, 2012-04-21 00:59 — RJD

Attaching spurious monetary values to an activity that can't really be measured in cash terms and doesn't represent cash out the door of the business is one of the more irritating latest fads taking hold and is an example of bad science. There is only a proven loss if the business has lost sales that it would certainly have made absent the thickos on the team or has spent money it can't recover. Furthermore, because every business employs stupid people and we must assume that the spread of stupidity is reasonably even across businesses within a market, no single business is losing that much more than the other as a result of a disproportionate share of stupidity within the business. There is no basis to these kinds of loss claims unless it can be proven that the business lost market share or paid more for inputs than it would otherwise have.