rest of the workforce. The two-day and one-day simulations are provided by Business Methodologies.

Know your impact
The simulations are customized for Butler’s business, and are designed to enable all employees to understand the financial metrics used by the company, as a way to enable better decision making, says Lane. “Even for employees like welders and office staff who don’t deal in high-level decisions, we still want them to understand how they’re connected to those decisions,” says Lane. “We want them to understand conversion costs and overhead costs, and their individual impact on productivity and performance.”

Butler is still rolling out the simulations, and will likely require another 18 months to present the training to its entire workforce across all of the company’s seven North American plants. But Butler is already seeing benefits from the simulations, says Lane. Every participant is tested on his or her business acumen before and after participating in a simulation, she notes, and the average improvement in business knowledge is between 60 percent and 80 percent.

Further, Lane believes that employees are applying that knowledge in their individual jobs in ways that are having an impact on Butler’s business. “We’re seeing it in the bottom line in an increase in EBIT (earnings before income taxes),” she says. “We’ll take credit for that, absolutely. What we’re finding is that especially out in the plant locations, people are much more engaged. We have a huge challenge right now on improving costs, and people now understand what they need to do to do that.”

For the simulations, Lane says she looked at offerings from several vendors, but selected Business Methodologies for the board-based simulations in part because of the company’s willingness to provide a “train the trainer” program. “For cost effectiveness, I want to be able to train my internal staff to go out and deliver this, so I don’t have to keep using their trainers all the time,” she explains. Some other business simulation providers don’t offer that option, Lane notes.
In creating a customized business simulation for a manufacturing company, the providers first spend significant time with the client’s executives and other personnel.

At BTS, Reed says a typical simulation development may begin with about 20 hours of BTS interviews with key subject matter experts at the client company. That may be followed by about 50 hours of additional interviews over the course of the simulation development, which usually takes several months.

What’s the price?

 Business simulation pricing can depend on both the level of customization and the number of employees that ultimately participate. “What you have is a development cost and a delivery expense, so if that development cost is rolled over just 30 people, obviously, the cost could be very high,” Reed explains. The price of a highly customized, computer-based simulation presented only one time to a small group of employees could go as high as $2,000 per person, he says.

But most manufacturing clients spread the cost over larger employee groups, Reed indicates. “A typical rollout will be anywhere from three to 20 programs of 25 to 30 people each,” he says. “In addition, a simulation may be used at big events like an annual conference. For example, we did a simulation at IBM one time for 1,400 people in one day. So obviously, the per-participant fee comes way down with something like that.” Reed puts the low-end pricing for an “e-learning” simulation at about $30 per head.

Board-based simulations, though customized, are typically less expensive than their computer-based counterparts. Industry sources put the price at anywhere from $175 to $300 per person per day for a group of 24 to 30 participants.

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