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My team was brought in to reduce packaging costs and material consumption across SBD's entire global product portfolio. Specifically, they were getting crushed by competitors, especially Milwaukee, on the paper consumption and cost of their instruction manuals. Through redesigning these power tool manuals, we were able to reduce their annual paper consumption by 36 tons and $18M.
Teammates:
Lori Couto, Alex Bruns, Greg Keier, Chris Donze
To remain competitive SBD was desperately seeking cost-cutting measures, many taking the form of layoffs of highly skilled engineers. We discovered competitors were spending, on average, 30% less in producing their instruction manuals than SBD and we could potentially reduce paper cost significantly, reducing the amount of layoffs required.
Through interviews with copywriters, compliance officers, product managers, and manufacturing partners we discovered opportunities to redesign manuals beyond our competitors benchmarks. Many in the organization pushed back on this idea as these manuals contain highly sensitive legal information. This required us to get executive buy-in by showing them the art of the possible.
Various early mockups, starting with a deck of basic bicycle cards.
Playtesting with other game designers at Protospiel.
Thousands of games playtested with users.
Layers upon layers upon layers of design iteration.
Today, SBD manuals contain 40% less paper (and cost) than previously. This translates to 36 tons and $18M of paper saved without infringing on the usability and legal constraints of the instruction manuals.
If you're curious to learn more, please reach out:
ross@utilitygamelab.com
