You are the new General Manager of a destination transportation company. Your company operates a fleet of various sized busses and provides transportation for conventions and meetings that occur in your city. The board of directors, though happy with the revenue is very unhappy with the growth in costs, hired a consulting firm to develop benchmarks based on the operations of your national competitors and fired your predecessor because he was unable to reduce the costs and achieve the benchmarks quickly enough. You know you need to address overall costs as quickly as possible $$ but need a plan of attack because if you focus on trying to reduce all of them simultaneously you will not be successful.

Using the information below, determine which of these costs you would attack first based on the calculated cost reduction potential.

Actual Last Year Benchmark

Passengers Served $550,000$

Revenue Per Passenger $$45\mathrm{.}30$

Labor Man Hours Per Passenger $\mathrm{.}25\mathrm{.}20$

Labor wage and benefit rate per hour $$18\mathrm{.}25$

Cleaning cost per passenger $$1\mathrm{.}85$ $$1\mathrm{.}25$

Fuel cost per passenger $$1\mathrm{.}30$ $$1\mathrm{.}00$

Supplies cost per passenger $$2\mathrm{.}25$ $$1\mathrm{.}50$