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4. MANUFACTURING
Customers by Design
When IT Director Gary Wallace started at $100-million Anderson Hardwood Floors eight years ago, there wasn't much use for computers. Manufacturing processes at what was then a 150-employee business were handwritten.
But with a fourfold growth in the company -- fueled by the housing boom, the home renovation craze and Anderson's growing e-commerce presence -- IT has become a business driver throughout the company. Six years ago, Wallace took control of IT as a one-man shop, and he now leads an IT staff of four.
"We went through huge growth the last few years," Wallace says, adding that the company's ranks have swelled to 600 employees scattered throughout five facilities. To handle the shift from a mom-and-pop shop to a major player in the flooring industry, Wallace stepped into Web 2.0 this spring by installing a Microsoft SharePoint server to function as a central repository for company information and documents, from invoices to vacation policies and project files.
Before the installation, however, Anderson had discovered the power of a popular interactive Web tool with a customer-facing effort. A year ago, it overhauled its basic Web site and added the Anderson Design Center, which lets viewers test the look of various floor styles and colors online and create virtual rooms before they purchase flooring for their homes.
Prior to the site redesign, Anderson's Web site got about 500 hits weekly. Within months of launching its next-generation site, that number shot up to 1,500 a day. "It didn't take much time for the word to get out," Wallace says, adding that Anderson spent months at the top of Google's "hardwood floors" unpaid search result list.
Wallace researched interactive plug-ins for the Design Center and settled on one from Dancik International, a Raleigh, N.C.-based firm specializing in visualization software for flooring companies. Wallace and his team spent a month taking hundreds of photos of floors. They couldn't use existing images because the quality of the lighting and color wasn't good enough for viewing on the site. "One of the biggest mistakes I made was underestimating the amount of work behind it," Wallace says.
Now Wallace and his team focus heavily on search engine optimization to help guide consumers to the site and present them with high-quality, dynamic content.
Dancik developed the software for the Design Center, and the site is hosted in-house at Anderson, which just launched the second version of its new Web site in January. Eventually, Wallace plans to offer users the ability to upload photos of their own rooms and overlay images of Anderson floors onto them.
Wallace credits much of the company's Web success to the "cheerleading squad" of executives supporting his efforts, including his bosses, the company president and executive vice president. "They understand [the Web is] never going to go away and is a great marketing and information tool for the consumer," he says.
Melissa Solomon is a freelance writer in Austin, Texas. Write to her at editor@ciodecisions.com.
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