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.