FurnishNet sets B2B links for Calif. retailer
By Brian Carroll -- Furniture Today, September 17, 2001
SAN DIEGO — SAN DIEGO — FurnishNet has won its first retail paying customer — northern California's Naturwood — since acquiring EDI company hfXchange, with more furniture retailers in the pipeline, according to the GERS subsidiary.
It is a significant breakthrough for business-to-business trading on the Internet, especially since the demise of RetailMetro five months ago and the folding of HomePoint two months before that.
Momentum appears to be building industry-wide on Internet-based transaction management. In addition to FurnishNet's moves, at least two other consortia of Top 100 retailers are looking at developing B2B exchanges, with announcements expected soon.
Naturwood will automate transactions with its 20 largest manufacturers using FurnishNet's Internet-based exchange. Several retail customers which originally were hfXchange clients came with the Boston-based company in the acquisition by FurnishNet two months ago. The customer list at the time of the deal included Jordan's Furniture, Leon's, Bob's Discount Furniture and Raymour & Flanigan.
"We made a very big impression on our customer base (at the recent GERS conference), so we have quite a few (retailers) in the pipeline," said Megan Leer, public relations manager at GERS.
Explaining the decision to migrate purchase orders to the Internet via FurnishNet, Naturwood's Bob Skamnes, management information systems director, said the retailer spends too much time "at the fax machine sending POs, and our vendors spend too much time keying in information. With FurnishNet, we can … eliminate those time-consuming and error-prone processes."
"By automating these processes, we're hoping to shorten the cycle times on special orders, and decrease the lead time we quote to customers," Skamnes said.
FurnishNet declined to provide pricing details, but described customer billing as being based on both the number of purchase orders and the dollar value of the purchase orders.
The company has been working to automate via the Net transaction management of POs, acknowledgements, advance shipping notices and invoices. In order to do this with increasingly large vendor networks, the company uses XML and an open platform to work with EDI, e-mail and even older, fax-dependent systems.
This approach has meant connecting about five vendors per week per retailer using the system, Leer said. About 25% of the 130 vendors running transactions through FurnishNet are paying for the service, she said.
