A year ago this month, Haworth head of IT Michael Moon and one of his team members locked themselves in a conference room at the company's headquarters in Holland, Mich., and tried to solve a puzzle. After slumping sales forced a three-year halt to an Oracle ERP deployment, the project was finally back on. Now Moon and his team had to figure out how to design a new order management system inside the ERP system without disrupting the resurging business.
Haworth is one of the world's biggest makers of office furniture, designing and building entire cubicle stations, including the walls, floors, lighting, desks and chairs. For the past dozen years, the company has been on an aggressive buying spree, acquiring more than 25 companies and growing sales to more than $2 billion. But with each acquisition came a new IT system, and at one point Moon found himself running five data centers in North America. The company's IT systems became a hodgepodge of corporate software from Baan, SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Oracle, not to mention a number of second-tier vendors and various legacy systems, some dating back to the 1960s.
Shortly before Moon arrived as vice president of global information services in 1998, Haworth decided to switch to an Oracle platform for almost all its core systems, such as order management, and to bolt on specialized functions, such as supply chain and warehouse management, from other vendors. It was supposed to be a high-tech awakening and a feather in the cap of a CIO's career. But the dot-com bust hit the company hard, sales plummeted, and the Oracle project was mostly shelved until business picked up.
By early last year -- finally -- Haworth began shipping more furniture than it had in years; 2004 sales hit $1.26 billion. The Oracle deployment was back on. That gave Haworth a rare opportunity to rethink how it uses technology. But at the same time, the company had to keep the business running and ride the resurging economy. "We had this challenge of looking like one company, not 15," Moon says. "It's an opportunity companies seldom get to change everything."
The most important part of the Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) project was designing an order management system with Oracle that could handle Haworth's complex business: 34 million items available in custom configurations and at different price points. From earlier in his career, Moon understood the potential drain of such a big project, which could suck up the time of maybe 100 people for six months.
"I've been through several of these projects before," says Moon. "We needed a way to do it without pain and disruption. The business was growing; we were competing for resources. How do you do it without pulling people out of the business? So we locked ourselves in a room and said, 'Let's figure out how to do it differently.' If you don't get the front end right, the back end doesn't matter."
This was first published in February 2006