ICT and e-Business Impact in the Furniture Industry - empirica

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ICT and e-business impact in the furniture industry6000 to 30,000 euros for manufacturers). The shops pay to have visitors to their webpages (information about the show room, the services to the consumers, the brands theysell and the products). The producers pay to obtain more visibility for their products(being their catalogues on the Webmobili search engine because requested by theshops). As by July 2007, the search engine had 20,000 products of 350 producercatalogues, requested by 1,100 paying shops. Further, there are 60 producers paying tohave their banners.The service portalObjectivesWebmobili has built a database of catalogues of manufacturers and retailers (oftensupplied on paper) and all this information has been standardised and migrated to theservice in such a way that it can be easily accessed by the public. A unique feature, atleast on the Italian market, is that catalogues are edited and harmonised: they aredesigned and presented in a user-friendly way, in order to primarily provide information(including price range) to the public rather than being a promotional tool. The effort ofstandardisation was in fact the main challenge of this service and is considered its mainpoint of strength. The purpose and the value added of this standardisation process is tooffer actually comparable and objective information to consumers, therefore clearing theinformation normally provided on catalogues of the promotional content. It addresses thedomestic market and mainly includes national manufacturers.Products are divided into 16 compartments, including, among the others: kitchens, tablesand chairs, sofas, living rooms, children furniture, lighting, office, bathroom, furniturecomplements, garden furniture, doors. The database, containing product’s information ofabout 350 – mostly Italian – furniture manufacturers, can be considered a goodrepresentation of the offering of the medium and high range Italian players, while lowrange companies are less represented. For each product, Webmobili provides thefollowing information: name of the product, manufacturer, designer, production year, style(contemporary, classic or rustic), dimension, material, price range, guarantee durationand awards. A photo and a description of the product are also available. It also providesinformation about the points of sales – next to the consumer – where the item can bepurchased. All the information is organised according to the various parameters of theadopted taxonomies.The main objective of Webmobili is to give visibility to the offer of Italian furniture whichmainly consists of small-medium sized manufacturers and independent retailers withlimited investment capability as for advertising and promotion. It also offers the possibilityto customers of high range products to reach fully detailed information about the availableoffer and prices. The rationale behind this business idea was that there was littleawareness - among consumers - of the broad range of offer in this field. Webmobiliproved to be a communication channel bridging an information gap between the demandand the offer.It is still a unique initiative of this kind in this segment of the Italian market; other initiativesare either run directly by furniture suppliers or address the B2B market. It positioning andits success are related to the peculiar characteristic both of the offer and of the demandof the Italian furniture sector, in particular to the high relevance of the higher range anddesign –based products.137
ICT and e-business impact in the furniture industryChallengesThe set up of this service faced two main challenges: technical challenges related to thestandardisation of the product classification and market challenges related to the degreeof acceptance by manufacturers of a third-party-run information service.5.8.2 e-Business approachTiming and costs of the activityTechnology usedThe service was set up in 2001 and started operations in 2002. In 2007 the web portalhas been completely redesigned. The initial investment of this initiative was 750,000euros, including both the purchasing of the technological infrastructure and thedevelopment of the content. The system requires constant maintenance both for thetechnical and the editorial features. Out of the 15 employees, seven work at the updatingof the editorial content.The core of the service is the database where data are organised by, and can beaccessed through, the three main categories: products, retailers and, in the new versionson line from December 2007, manufacturers and designers. The whole service runs onstandard Microsoft ® environment (SQL) 59 and Dotnet 2.0. There is no integrationbetween the Webmobili information system and those of shops and manufacturers, thenecessary information is exchanged through standards means (e-mail but still on paperas well) and then processed locally. The site provides a set of functionalities for searchinginformation. No e-commerce functionality is provided; therefore, security requirementsare not particularly critical, standard firewalls are suitable.Standardisation of cataloguesStandardisation was the starting point of the service, the main activity as for the involvedresources and it is considered the main point of strength. The aim to provide actual andobjective comparison of the high-range national offer of furniture was very ambitious andrequired a relevant effort for the identification of parameters (such as dimension, material,price range) and coding to be used. The services had to address the issue of theindustrial categorisation of the presented items; it had to reach a common understandingof different classifications as the expected output was that consumers may have, withineach product sheet, the same kind of standards information for each item. The mainbarrier was related to price transparency. Many retailers were initially resistant to the ideaof providing information about prices on the web. The proactive role of Webmobili ininvolving relevant business players and promoting transparency of prices was one of themain challenges.59SQL stands for Structured Query Language; it is a standard interactive and programminglanguage for getting information from and updating a database138
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ICT and e-Business Impact in the Furniture Industry - empirica

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