Experience Curve

As a concept designed by the Boston Consultancy Group, it bears significant distinction from the widely known learning curve effect, although they do bear some similarities common to each other.

Many a day it has been a commonly known fact that time spent labouring away at a task tended to see a gradual decrease as the procedures were repeated at a rate of about 10% to 15% as experience went up twofold.


However, the learning curve effect didn't attract broad recognition in other arenas, being confined to military drills and so-called direct labour. But tasks under constant threat of change from service design managers could not just become the subject of such a strict method of repetitive performance. There would be too much incompatibility for non-perfunctory tasks to take in the learning curve effect in its entirety.

 The first attempt by the Boston Consultancy Group to actually flesh out the understanding behind  experience curve consisted of accounting for cost behaviour over time. Successfully cutting down on costs could at best assure survival as a lesser competitor in the market. The links binding together competitive profitability and market share were too glaringly obvious to be overlooked. The rationale behind the learning curve seemed too plausible an explanation to describe the observed experiment. Apparently, the race to catch up to long-established competitors was always down the cost curve.

This is,in short, how the experience curve works. It is basically the idea that costs will eventually drop as a task is repeated over and over, implying that the staff doing it fine tune their skills to perform better overall. It doesn't for work routines subject to changes. Its basic premise is that people tend to get better at what they do if they do this enough times a day to realise more efficient patterns to accomplishing the desire end.