CASE STUDY No. 9704

KEY WORDS CATALOGS, PRODUCT; CATALOGS ON CD/ROM; SALES LITERATURE

Haworth, Inc.
One Haworth Center
Holland, Michigan 49423-9576

Contact: Ted Evans, Systems Analyst. 616-393-3000.

Summary

Furniture manufacturer packages its entire catalog and sales-related documents in one CD/ROM, vastly reducing the amount of paper that salespeople need to carry to customer meetings and improving presentations. Printing costs are expected to decline by $400,000.

Action

Haworth, Inc., is the second largest manufacturer of office furniture in the United States. Like many companies selling merchandise to the business sector, Haworth has for years printed a large, frequently updated catalog, along with numerous related publications and forms. In 1992, the company began to develop an alternative, paperless way to distribute this information, SourceBook, a CD/ROM that runs on Windows 95. (For technical data, contact Matt Stegenga, Resource Technology, 616-355-7000, ext. 26.) This has not been an inexpensive project. Start-up costs have included $500,000 for software development; and $2 to $3 million more to train 600 people, equip 260 market managers with laptop computers, and other costs. Despite the heavy initial expense, Haworth believes it is making a wise investment which will pay off in the long term. The company says it has already realized these benefits:

  1. Decreased printing costs and paper usage. Because of frequent price and product changes, Haworth over the years has consumed vast amounts of paper, and spent more than $1 million annually for updated sales literature. Introduction of the CD will enable the company to reduce its annual printing budget by 40% by 2005.
  2. Higher quality client presentations. With the CD, salespeople custom-design client presentations on the computer. The old way was to cut and paste from catalogs, which wasted large amounts of paper and yielded an inferior presentation by comparison. Response time to customer questions also has been reduced since all essential information is loaded on the CD/ROM. (Haworth estimates that the 2,000-plus documents in its SourceBook equal a stack of paper 6 feet tall. An updated CD is sent out monthly.)
  3. New training opportunities. SourceBook helps to train employees and customers. For example, one video clip on the CD explains how wood veneer furniture is made and shows the various kinds of wood available.

Payback

To quote Systems Analyst Ted Evans: "We believe that from a marketing perspective alone, SourceBook has already paid for itself through customer satisfaction, the general impres-siveness and high visibility of the product, and the increase in employee efficiency."

 

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