Meet Great Game All-Star: Woodward Printing

Each year, at The Annual Gathering of Games, we recognize several companies who represent the “best of the best” in open-book management practice by honoring these companies with an All-Star Award. This prestigious award recognizes and celebrates the remarkable achievements of companies from around the globe that have fully embraced the principles of open-book management and The Great Game of Business, and have demonstrated outstanding results. Throughout the next few weeks, we’d like to introduce you to each of these companies in hopes that their experience will inspire you as you continue to explore open-book management.

Meet Great Game All-Star Company: Woodward Printing Services

Commercial printing is an extremely competitive business with razor-thin margins, which means any job has the potential to turn into a loss if any mistakes are made. Woodward Printing Services (WPS) – a division of Woodward Communications - is a full-service, progressive printing company that was in dire needs of improving their efficiencies. While WPS was generating about 12% of company-wide revenues, it represented less than 4.5% of its profits.

Things began to turn around for WPS in May of 2012 when the employees launched a MiniGame built around data collection where the goal was to measure the time operators would log on their machines for each job. The challenge was to get the team – which had logged some $40,000 in overtime costs for the first quarter – to shift from thinking about the top line and more about the expense side of the equation, which was the real drag on profits. The MiniGame helped reporting accuracy surge from 80% to 94%, which immediately helped identify which projects were more profitable than others.

*Contact Great Game’s Kristi Stringer to learn more about the All-Star Awards.