Danish modern resource finds the software it needs
Gary Evans, Senior Editor -- Furniture Today, May 21, 2007
What do you do when you have orders coming from three continents and your business is growing 30% a year? That's the challenge for Carl Hansen & Co., a Danish furniture maker that's had a 50-year collaboration with legendary furniture designer Hans J. Wenger, whose tables and chairs helped define the movement known as Danish modern.
With its straight-forward look and spare lines, the movement again is in vogue for consumers who want a retro look. The trend, vibrant in U.S. home furnishings and apparently everywhere else, created global demand and the need for systems to deal with it.
Carl Hansen & Co., with about $25 million in annual sales currently, needed to keep track of its chairs and tables, which come in a multitude of wood types and colors. That meant a tool that would retrieve key data on orders and create sales invoices for each product and country. With subsidiaries in Canada and Japan and dealers throughout Asia, Europe and North America, complex data needed to be clear and easy to access.
"The success of our business depends on whether we work with valid data or not," said CEO Knud Erik Hansen. "It's all about getting the right products to the right place at the right time."
The company found what it needed in software it said is faster to implement, easier to use and maintain, and more affordable than most business intelligence products. It's called timeXtender from timeExtender Inc.
Peter Bjarne Andersen, Carl Hansen's IT manager, said the company can now trust the data it extracts. "It has freed a lot of valuable time that we now use on analyzing our business, enabling us to focus on how we can influence the bottom line."
Greater data transparency and usability provide a real competitive advantage, he added.
One key advantages timeXtender offers, Andersen said, is independence from external IT assistance, which had been a bottleneck to operations. The company can access all the information it needs to meet its goals.
Xtender also eliminated manual coding, allowing the new system to be brought online quicker. And start-up costs were kept at a minimum.
Moreover, users don't need to master technical details because coding is translated into tools that everybody can understand and use. The company can maintain and improve data quality in-house, Andersen said.
"We simply make better market decisions with quality data, and get increasing returns on investment with our efforts," said Andersen. "If we know enough about our market, we can be proactive rather than reactive to the changes in demand."
