L&P unveils R&D center
By David Perry -- Furniture Today, March 18, 2007
Carthage, Mo. — Home furnishings supplier Leggett & Platt pulled back the curtain last week on its new corporate research and development center here, a key element in a strategy to reassert its leadership in product innovation.
The supplier, with a long tradition of selling wire-based products to bedding and upholstery producers, said its innovations won't be confined to those fashioned from wire or crafted from steel.
Dave Haffner, L&P's CEO, said, "We've got a wonderful menu of hybrid products ... that will hopefully reinvigorate the industry."
Karl Glassman, L&P's chief operating officer, said, "Our history is wire-based. Our future won't be exclusively wire-based."
The two headed a delegation of top Leggett officials who hosted reporters at the company's new R&D facility, officially called the Idea Center.
Haffner and Vincent Lyons, vice president of engineering and product development, and president of the company's Machinery & Technology Group, dedicated the center when they pulled back a sheet that draped the Idea Center's outdoor sign. "Idea" is an acronym for Innovation, Design, Engineering and Acceleration.
The center, which L&P officials said represented an investment of between $5 million and $7 million, opened for business earlier this year. Its goal is to integrate "science and technology to deliver quality engineered solutions benefiting our customers and our world," the company said.
The 30,000-square-foot facility is stocked with cutting-edge computer systems and testing and research technologies.
A staff of 43 technicians, headed by Lyons, currently is working at the center. L&P's machinery, engineering and technology divisions are based at the center, which serves as the company's international headquarters for corporate R&D programs.
L&P officials said the center is at the heart of a broad new innovation strategy. "This is a very important element of our corporate growth," Haffner said. The strategy, which calls for creative contributions from inside and outside the company, is designed to provide "a continuing mill of ideas," he said.
Other elements of the strategy include a new Web site where people inside and outside L&P can submit ideas, the creation of a new engineering council, and leadership changes (see story on page 74).
"We perceive ourselves as real innovators in the bedding industry," Glassman said, citing a folding boxspring recently developed by L&P.
"We are trying to better understand consumers and improve their quality of life," he said, noting the bedding industry has been in transition in recent years, and that L&P is poised to "come back with more innovation."
A panel of L&P executives, which included Glassman, Haffner, Lyons and Tony Garrett, president of L&P's Global Systems Group, was moderated by Mark Quinn, group executive vice president of sales and marketing in the bedding group.
Quinn said, "More and more, Leggett & Platt is looking at the consumer and what the consumer is relating to.... If we can make our customer successful with retailers, they win. If we can make retailers successful with their customers, we all win.
"Making sure the consumer is front and center is the most important part of that process," he said.
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