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The Office Furniture Industry is
typically structured as a make-to-stock, standard
product line offering, the upholstered
and office segments of this Industry are characterized
by highly customized, customer or designer
specified finished goods. These
finished products are defined and developed from within
a product line framework that is option oriented
and sometimes even dimensional
in nature. As these market segments continue to mature
and expand, the complexities associated with
these types of customized product
lines translate into operational and technological challenges
that must be addressed by Office and Furniture
manufacturers to be successful. Some of these challenges
include:
- Increased Product Complexity: Changing market conditions dictate
increased product line options, finishes, and rapidly changing
fabric styles. Coordination across all departments is required
to maintain the existing product lines and effectively roll out
changes and new product lines as required.
- Reduced Lead Times: Competitive pressures have forced the
overall order fulfillment lead times to be reduced. The actual
production
lead times are a small part of this overall lead time and relatively
constant, forcing attention to other areas of the business for
reductions and efficiencies.
- Sales Automation: Increased access to technology within the
Customer base has put pressure on Furniture manufacturers to
provide automated
tools to configure and price products, as well as provide visualization
of the products with dynamic graphics and layout utilities. The
ability to deliver and support this type of automation requires
specialized applications and skill sets that may not be currently
available within the organization.
- Access to Business Information: Fabric oriented product lines
are faced with the challenge of long lead times for raw materials
and short lead times for finished products. In order to effectively
address this, access to current and historical business information
to drive forecasting and material planning is critical.
- Technology Integration: Technology improvements throughout
the supply chain have placed an increased demand on the availability
and access to business information. Customers, manufacturing
equipment
and material suppliers are just a few examples where business
information integration is required across multiple platforms.
Frontier for Furniture is a configuration-based ERP
application that has been specifically designed
to address these and many additional
challenges facing the Office and Furniture Industries.
Frontier for Office Furniture is a fully integrated
suite of application software modules, built
upon the foundation of a table-based, dimensional
Product Configuration module. The functionality of
the product Configurator, along with the supporting
application modules, has
been designed to streamline all activities associated
with the order fulfillment process; from Dealer/Customer
quotes to sales
orders, production scheduling to material optimization,
product tracking to truck loading, performance
measurement to after sales
service.
Over the years, Friedman Corporation has developed extensive
Furniture Industry operational and software implementation
experience. Friedman
Corporation consultants have documented this experience
in the form of an implementation methodology, COMPASS,
that has been proven
to be a highly effective method of defining, executing,
and tracking all aspects of a Friedman Corporation software
implementation project.
The Office Furniture Industry specific functionality
within the Frontier for furniture application, along
with this
extensive Industry expertise,
ensures that Office Furniture manufacturers
will be successful in achieving their business objectives
within an
aggressive implementation timeline. The successful
implementation of a Friedman Corporation software solution
has provided existing
Friedman customers with initial and ongoing benefits
to their business, including:
- Dramatic reductions of overall order cycle time by integrating
all operational and technical aspects of an Office or Upholstered
Furniture manufacturing business.
- Advancement of strategic relationships with Dealers, Designers,
Customers and Sales channels by providing the required tools
to streamline the quotation to sales order process, as well
as provide
integration with products such as 20-20 GIZA.
- Improved efficiencies across all aspects of the organization,
allowing Furniture manufacturers to support substantial growth
trends with limited increases in staffing and the associated
labor and overhead costs.
- The realization of extensive cost reductions (inventory, scrap,
procurement) by integrating all aspects of the supply chain,
from internal component production to outside material suppliers.
- Reduction of order errors and manual “special orders” that
are processed thru the introduction and leveraging of an integrated
product Configurator.
- Improved responsiveness to changing market conditions by providing
a centralized product specification and pricing engine for
both internal customer service and external sales channels.
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