In-plant Sales-per-employee Ranking Reveals Surprising Results

Last month, we showed you the largest in-plants, ranked by sales and employees. Now we've taken that data and calculated the sales per employee for each operation—and the results are surprising.

Several in-plants that ranked lower on our other two lists have leapt to the top of our sales-per-employee list, a sign that size is not the only impressive feature of a leading in-plant. Though Allstate's well-honed in-plant tops the list—with an impressive $431,369 in sales* for each of its 367 employees—after that several names emerge that don't often see the spotlight: the City of San Francisco, Zurich/Farmers Insurance, the State of Michigan, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee and Ohio State University are all among the top 10, each boasting more than $290,000 in sales for each in-plant employee.

Though consultants like Howie Fenton, now with IMG, have noted that sales per employee is not always an accurate indication of an in-plant’s performance (benchmarking against similar operations, he says, is a more revealing option), we present these results for your general information, not as an indicator of one in-plant's loftier position over another. For truly, if an in-plant with a high sales-per-employee number is not proving its value to its parent organization, it may still find itself in trouble.

To see our sales-per-employee ranking, click here.

*Allstate submitted only annual budget data, so that figure was used in our calculations.