Efficiency pressure

Under the efficiency pressure is generally understood as the drive of an on exchange processes based system , under different conditions to those with the highest efficiency set.

Depending on the type of system, such as a company, a living being or a society, various natural or artificially generated incentives can exist for this purpose. The higher the pressure to be efficient, the greater the incentives to implement the quickest or most comprehensive adjustment possible to the most efficient state. Signs of high efficiency pressure are therefore large rates of change , while low efficiency pressure usually results in systems that are stable over the long term. Factors are, for example, the availability of materials, energy or other resources as well as the competitive situation of the system in relation to other systems.

Efficiency pressure in different categories

Examples of special forms of efficiency pressure are the pressure created by the market economy for a company to generate the highest possible profit . There are usually different hierarchies so that one can relate the efficiency pressure on an economic area, on an individual company, its departments or even the individual workplace, although their respective manifestations such as the company's share price or the department's budget or the job security of the employee, are very different. The same applies to the adaptation or efficiency of a biological species, an individual or certain elements from their organism down to the cellular level. An example of artificially generated pressure to achieve efficiency is provided by environmental legislation in its effects on environmentally relevant economic processes. The release of carbon dioxide as part of emissions trading has meanwhile become a cost issue for many companies, which is why there is now the desired tendency to reduce these emissions by increasing efficiency. This expands previous incentive systems such as image issues or a moral and social responsibility and has thus led to an increase or also often only the creation of efficiency pressure.

The universality of the concept of efficiency and thus also of the efficiency pressure on a wide variety of system types enables, as illustrated, a broad application of the concept across almost all scientific disciplines, from natural to geosciences and biosciences to social and economic sciences. In most cases, the pressure to be efficient is no or only an indirectly measurable variable and is often used in a rather abstract manner, which means that the properties and meaningfulness of the conceptual concept have to be critically questioned again and again in individual cases. It should be noted that the pressure to be efficient is only one factor and in the rarest of cases can it fully explain the change in a system or its state, which is also often due to the incorrect assessment of which state is the most efficient for a system and for what reasons Factors in what form contribute to or counteract the pressure for efficiency. For example, there is no such thing as a perfectly adapted type and, despite the high pressure to be efficient, employees are often far less efficient than they could be, in spite of the high pressure to be efficient, whereas often there is no necessarily low efficiency even with low pressure to be efficient.

Increased efficiency by reducing redundancy

The fact that large rates of change are a hallmark of high efficiency pressures is because redundancy is required to cope with high rates of change . This means that there is a visible “abundance” which, when reduced, can increase the efficiency of a system or a process. Efficiency pressure acts on this excess. Therefore, when taking measures to increase efficiency, it must be weighed up whether the redundancy is an excess that does not contribute to the effect required by a process, or whether the redundancy is required as the distance between maximum entropy and the currently existing entropy to maintain a system or a process. The weighing up is made more difficult in particular by the random nature of the disturbances that affect a system and can be absorbed by it without damage through the use of redundancy. For this reason, there is in principle a conflict between the demand for more flexibility and more efficiency in a system. If there is no redundancy, even the smallest faults can severely impair the entire functionality of a system. One example today is the effects of even the smallest incidents in local transport systems.

In some cases the efficiency of a process is increased by shifting the entropy increase associated with the redundancy reduction to the system that uses this process. An example here can be the shift of effort (e.g. service at the bank counter) of a service provider to his customer (who has to carry out telebanking, for example). In system theory, this involves the export of entropy from a service provider to a service consumer. The attractiveness of the redundancy reduction through entropy export lies for the service provider in particular in the fundamental difficulty of assessing the costs of entropy and, for example, of mapping them in monetary terms. Similarly, a company can increase its efficiency by shifting burdens to its employees in a way that does not directly reveal the cost of the entropy to be absorbed by the employees.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See definition of redundancy as the distance between the currently available entropy and the maximum entropy in ISO / IEC DIS 2382-16: 1996.