Even though both the companies missed market expectations in their latest quarterly results, Home Depot seems to have handled the difficult housing market and slow demand recovery better with successful cost-cutting and efficiency initiatives, store remodels, improved service and better pricing strategies.
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There is much scope for cutting waste and improving efficiency in the public sector.
Of course, it does not take double-digit inflation to prod businesses into cutting costs and improving efficiency and quality.
This, in effect, is what many companies end up doing, though it is often framed as increasing efficiency and cutting costs.
Even though Toyota is officially still committed to support its manufacturing base in Japan, it hopes to ride out the current slump in demand and adverse foreign exchange movement through cost-cutting, hyper-efficiency and collaboration on new technology with parts suppliers.
The project team will build and beta-test new features and tools for entrepreneurs and businesses with the purpose of cutting red tape, increasing efficiency, and supporting American businesses and American jobs.
The Federal government is also committed to creating jobs and cutting costs by investing in energy efficiency in Federal buildings.
Most executives, managers and investors have come to believe that cost cutting, and striving for more efficiency, is the solution for most business problems.
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Apart from scooping up Daihatsu to get small-car engineering and engines years ago, Toyota has concentrated solely on improving its own offering, with a relentless focus on efficiency, cost-cutting and a flood of new variations of successful models brought to market at an increasingly rapid rate.
The BBC's Steve Rosenberg, in Moscow, says that in the six years that Mr Serdyukov was defence minister, he tried to reform Russia's outdated armed forces by cutting costs and personnel and by boosting efficiency.
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It says the way to reduce paper use lies in cutting consumption in industrialised countries, improving papermaking efficiency, and using more recycled paper and materials other than wood in manufacture.
So, although the souped-up alternator adds 1% to CO2 emissions in its own right, its inventors claim it improves overall fuel efficiency by about 6%, cutting CO2 emissions in proportion.
With what the British newspaper the Financial Times described as "ruthless efficiency, " O'Neal began cutting costs.
So, cutting back on those subsidies suggest there would be an efficiency gain.
In a bid to maintain operational efficiency, the company is undertaking several cost cutting measures including a number of lay-offs.
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Then there is the simple notion that cost cutting must be good, because it makes for greater efficiency, and efficiency is good.
According to the National Audit Office only a quarter of the claimed savings were fairly represented while the second efficiency programme launched just last year is "cutting services to claim efficiencies" - and has "acute" measurement problems.
The company's telepresence and data center efficiency technologies could both be seen as cost-cutting measures that companies will embrace in tight times.
It's a safe bet that even if there were no pressure to reduce greenhouse gas-related emissions from buildings, today's efficiency ethos and sheer economic self-interest would drive interest in cutting building energy use.
So we're working to create jobs by all means necessary, be it by cutting taxes for small businesses that create them, to investing more in infrastructure and in energy efficiency, or giving you more help to close budget shortfalls.
By making efficiency savings in government and selling state-owned assets, Mr Brown said he could meet debt-cutting targets and he said it would be "fine" if certain programmes - relating to what he described as back-office and administrative functions - were cut.
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