Haworth Builds Better Dealer Network

Haworth, a Holland, Mich.-based manufacturer of office furniture and workspace environments, recently turned to IBM and Austin, Texas-based partner Ascendant Technology to implement a new online portal application to interact with its independent furniture dealers.

With sales reaching $1.26 billion across 120 countries, Haworth needed to provide an efficient way for its dealer customers to access information on the cost and availability of its products, as well as marketing, sales and financial data. Haworth wanted this information to be available in real-time to dealers to increase sales and improve business processes and customer service. It sought to replace an Oracle portal because it did not offer secure single sign-on capabilities, and required the furniture maker's sales representatives to spend more than 30 minutes on each customer call, looking up information such as product availability, pricing and order status from disparate sources. The solution? IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Lotus Workplace for Web Content Management. With that in place, Haworth is providing on-demand access to vital information for customers and staff, and, in turn, has also significantly reduced the time spent answering customer-service calls.

In addition, the new portal enables Haworth customers to securely sign on to obtain specific financial and pricing data, thanks to a customer-maintained access and authentication process that was written by Ascendant. Prior to deploying the IBM/Ascendant solution, Haworth's portal averaged roughly 12 visitors per month from a couple of dealerships; after having the new portal in place for just about six months, it received more than 4 million hits from more than 21 countries.