Windles Group, whose greetings cards are sold in their millions in high-street shops, has seen turnover grow by 5% each year for the past four years. And, according to managing director Bruce Podmore, it has been busy growing since day one – for 30 years to be exact, when his company moved to its old base in a pretty village in Buckinghamshire.
“When we moved to Long Crendon in 1986 we started empire building and over about 10 years ended up spread across four buildings clustered around a car park,” he says. “This was great for modular growth, but being based in four buildings threw up problems every time we took another rung up the expansion ladder, with work co-efficiencies and communication to name just two.”
The challenge
There were of course more than two. Podmore admits his team was working in “blissful ignorance” of how the inefficiencies were stacking up. Windles had printing presses in three of its four buildings at one time or another during its stay at Long Crendon and racking up costs of at least £120,000 a year just moving products from building to building.
“We needed extra staff, forklifts and management information systems to ensure we kept in control. We had four separate facilities: four reception areas, four sets of loos and four sets of loos for people with disabilities, etc. The sledgehammer came when we analysed it all and found out how much we were duplicating and spending unnecessarily. We couldn’t see the wood for the trees.”
Windles Group employs almost 100 staff producing posters and packaging for brands such as Molton Brown, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Disney and the BBC. However, 85% of its work is from greetings cards, complex work involving, embossing, thermographic finishing, the laying of holograms on to wet UV varnish and cold-foil printing for up to 50 colours to be overlaid on a card.
And it was a complexity that almost mirrored the difficult logistical situation for the ever-expanding group, he says. The fierce competition needed to stay ahead of rivals means offering specialist printing techniques, which feeds through to the need to maximise efficiencies without looking abroad. The desire to buy British has helped businesses like Windles: retailers and customers are passionate about wanting products produced in the UK, Podmore says, and more trade is being wrenched back from overseas, fuelling growth.
The answer was to bring the operation under one roof, but where? Podmore and his team did not have to look far – just across Oxfordshire-Bucks border to the market town of Thame a few miles from Oxford. A purpose-built development had been completed including two-high specification industrial units. One of which Windles took – 4,500m2 of space, nearly doubling total floor area of its four old buildings.
The new building’s polished concrete floors are wrapped in a free-span high-insulation box with biomass boiler, rooflights, temperature and humidity controls and a BREEAM rating of ‘very good’ on environmental sustainability.
The importance of a low-carbon, energy-efficient building is vital to Windles Group, which has won awards for recycling and green innovation and therefore “needed our new headquarters to replicate the energy efficient nature the business already holds”.
The method
The move, involving three B1 Heidelberg presses and a host of other kit, began on 16 December 2015 and finished around Easter time for a total investment of £5m. Engineers were used to shift heavy machinery but “it was my joy and comfort we installed all the other machinery ourselves”, says Podmore.
The move was an intricate process involving CAD mapping, modelling and plotting every bit of floor space to ensure an inch-perfect fit for all that kit. Floor surfaces had to be perfectly levelled, power lines laid and columns positioned before the decommissioning of machines even began.
One of the biggest challenges however was not technical put personal: “There’s a natural human tendency to fear change and I underestimated how difficult it would be to win over employees to the new location. Some staff, after all, have been with the company 15 or 20 years and you can understand their reluctance and confusion.”
So Windles held informal induction days when departments would visit the new building and underscored these by hosting a Christmas party in the new building so everyone could walk around it and get a feel for the space. Podmore used a specialist consultant to “make a very soft and gentle approach”, so people felt free to voice their concerns and he could allay their fears.
The open-plan heart of Windles Group operations now centres on a 150sqm hub where customer service, production and warehousing and distributions are controlled by hot-desking departmental managers. Production meanwhile follows an “absolute logic” – a smooth and sequential flow with one department no more than 5m from the next one.
“When one job ends, those pallets and that job automatically move on to the next process no more than a few steps adjacent. So there’s no need to pick up 20 or so pallets and shift them to another building or even another part of the same building. We no longer have to upload on to pallets for embossing, die-cutting and foil blocking, and in the middle of all this is my office: I get to see and talk to everyone.”
The result
Consolidating several sites under one roof has made Windles Group greater than the sum of its parts, says Podmore. The building came in exactly on budget at £5m, and even if shipping of machinery was £200,000 outside budget, this will be clawed back through crucial efficiencies: the output of those same machines is between 6% and 8% better in the new base and the key, he reckons, is not so much mechanical but through more visibility and better communication.
“Right at the beginning I felt if we could bring everything and everyone together, that would be the ‘big ticket’ achievement. It would improve communication and enable everyone to get their heads around the workflow without having to shift stuff across the car park. But nobody could have anticipated the level of improvement that was self-stimulated just through better communication and working together in one place. I think it’s all about visibility.
“Before we had four separate spaces in four separate buildings so setting up maintenance programmes for example and dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘T’s was a big challenge. But when people are visibly together they work more effectively. It’s put us in a psychologically different, better place, no one is tucked out of site in a dark corner but making a demonstrable contribution.”
Podmore also raves about the value for money of every penny of the £5m spent on the building. Instead of the recommended 8% of roof space dedicated to transparent panels, Windles has 35% of rooflights without any loss of thermal insulation. Annual electric lighting, costing £27,000 on the old site, is now £4,500 a year. Heating costs had been £35,000, but are now more like £4,500.
Another benefit of bringing teams together is success in collective projects, such waste management. Not only has Windles reduced waste but now brings in £37,000 a year in revenue from recycling materials such as plastics and films. These are shredded, granulated and used as building insulation. Corrugated cardboard meanwhile has fetched £6,000.
Meanwhile a ‘Loop-It’ in-house campaign includes colour-coded action panels strategically placed throughout the factory to show how simple changes to the working day can have a positive impact on sustainable print and production. Initiatives such as these helped Windles secure not only new business but prizes, most recently a 2016 PrintWeek Awards gong for the Environmental Company of the Year. Judges commented: “Yes, the move to a new factory was impressive, but it was everything around the building that edged it – every impact was considered and acted on.”
Podmore has no doubt consolidating several sites under one roof was the driving force behind these kinds of success: “It was a costly exercise but the best money we have spent. I didn’t know it would bring in so many benefits and never anticipated how how much stronger it would make the business in terms of the new knowledge of itself. It made us self-question every aspect of our workflow and as a result I reckon in the first year of our move we will see business improve 17%.
“The only thing I would do differently focuses on space – I would have taken more of it. We couldn’t afford to have doubled it, but instead of the 4,500m2 we took, I would have taken on 5,000m2 and maybe a bit more.”
VITAL STATISTICS
Windles Group
Location Thame, Oxfordshire
Inspection host Managing director Bruce Podmore
Size Turnover: £10m; Staff: 97
Established 1986
Products Mostly greetings cards but also posters, magazine inserts, packaging and POS materials for clients including blue-chip names
Kit Three B1 Heidelberg Speedmaster SM 102 UV presses: a seven-colour perfector, a six-colour with cold foiling and a two-colour with coater for special treatments such as cold foiling and holograms, Bobst folder-gluers, a BMA sheetfed embosser and die-cutter, two guillotines plus a number of packing machines and inserting lines
Inspection focus Consolidating several sites under one roof
TOP TIPS
Weigh up the pros and cons Consolidating under one roof may streamline workflow and save money, but may also throw up conflicts on scheduling work and sharing space.
Reassure staff Employees may resist change so provide strategies to deal with new expectations, a clear explanation of new tasks and a generous adjustment period.
Inform customers and suppliers Tell them what you are doing and highlight the main or cumulative benefits they will experience from your move to one main building.
Set sensible targets Use hard numbers and definitive goals rather than fluffy aims and make sure you can measure the benefits achieved from your move to one site.
