Games Workshop goes on the asset hunt
Games Workshop goes on the asset hunt
Month Date, 2007: Games Workshop ran into problems with its fixed asset management system where a serious business risk can skew everything from inventory control to stock exchange results.
In the world of orcs, knights and space marines, there’s no bigger miniature producing name than Games Workshop (GW.) The iconic brand produces miniatures for war games where players compete against each other in table-top environments. The games are often epic in nature with some of GW’s ‘worldwide campaigns’ encompassing battles from around the globe which contribute to a grand encounter and is recorded in GW ‘history books.’
The main attraction of the miniatures is the customisability, which unlike traditional game offerings, presents players with an unpainted model allowing them to create whatever colour scheme and war paint they desire. Added to this is the customisability of the gaming map, which is a three dimensional diorama of mountains, hills, forests and a host of different terrain types, allowing players to come up with their own three dimensional scenarios and recreate historic battlefields.
This may not sound like much of an industry at first glance, but GW’s miniature business has been going strong since 1975 and is now a global empire. “The turnover for Games Workshop in Australia-New Zealand alone is around 18 million, we have a presence in Japan but they are run directly from head office in the UK,” says Andrew Robertson, Head of Finance at GW.
The battle begins
Despite having access to hordes of magical figurines, GW was in need of a little assistance in the form of its fixed asset management. While these fixed assets do not include the actual control of the miniatures, it did cover the control of assets like furniture, computers lifting equipment at the warehouse, kitchen appliances and the like.
Fixed asset management is an area that can quickly become the neglected stepchild of an organisation’s auditing process. While some organisations may have the most streamlined and efficient management processes in place, for most there is such an incredible focus on stock control and inventory management that fixed assets become the problem to be ‘looked at later’. It might not sound like such a bad thing but when you consider that fixed assets contribute to an organisations value where any business assessments will factor them in, share prices could be affected.
This is one area Robertson identified as being a problem for GW as when they realised the fixed asset control system wasn’t functioning accurately; the natural correlation was the reports being made to the stock market weren’t accurate either.
A treaty is signed
GW commissioned asset management provider, Smarthpath to carry out an audit after discovering noticeable shortcomings in the existing management system. “We were previously using a fixed asset module as part of an entire system; we basically had to get Smartpath in the first place to ensure what we had in the old system was accurate,” says Robertson.
The process turned into an integral part of a larger strategy for GW, who wanted to overhaul their entire financial control system but couldn’t import dirty data from the fixed asset module. This meant Smartpath’s role was a temporary one, but without the process GW would have been unable to deploy their brand new financial control system successfully.
It was a process that began simply by providing Smartpath with the current information of their fixed asset register, followed by the Smartpath team coming on site to conduct a review of the fixed assets. While this may sound like a job that could have been provided by in-house staff, it was a case of using software as well as manpower to ensure the records were not only accurate but imported across correctly.
“We weren’t going to move the old to the new until we'd sorted everything out with Smartpath and were comfortable with everything being accurate,” says Robertson.
Crisis averted
Robertson reports GW were pleasantly surprised by how long the entire process took. The Smartpath team were on-site for just the one day, and in that time managed to undertake a complete survey of the offices and warehouse to get a full asset list. From there it took a couple of weeks for the reports to arrive and the process to be completed from the Smartpath end.
This isn’t to say the deployment was all smooth sailing and over instantly, as Robertson points out there was an, “impact on daily operations, we had to spend a bit of time doing the review and the reports, something that we wanted to do anyway for accuracy to see what was in our system and see what assets we do have here.”
While this downtime is to be expected, this is the real crunch for a lot of organisations considering a tidy up of there asset register. Paying an auditing company such as Smartpath to come in and go through everything is one thing but the impact on your business when data has to be migrated is what really scares a lot of operators. According to Robertson, GW is fairly lean in terms of manpower and resources on the ground, so bringing in a third party firm was a very viable option and the reports GW received from Smartpath were easy to understand which helped to minimise the downtime.
“The main advantage was that we needed the work done there and then, we couldn’t handle it ourselves, and we needed to rely on them effectively to get stuff done,” says Robertson.