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

ICT and e-business impact in the furniture industryprocesses pursued by Ikea (section 3.2.3), is surely an outstanding example; it isnevertheless hardly replicable.Importance of the design areaThe green issueCAD and 3D tools are playing an increasingly important role for furniture companies.Exchange of data related to product design has a long tradition in this sector – theintroduction of CAD dates back some decades – and is diffused even among micro andsmall companies, without striking differences among countries.Case studies presented in Chapter 5 provide interesting insight on how design tools canbe further exploited for the purpose of customer-driven production and innovation,allowing a cost and timely-effective way to meet customers’ needs. In the Danona casestudy (section 5.1) made-to measure furniture is designed together with the client via a3D CAD/visualisation system, and the relevant production data are sent directly to themill. A similar approach is followed in a B2B context by the subject of another case study,the Austrian company Robinwood (section 5.5) that implemented an e-distributionplatform that allows planning, calculating and ordering customer-tailored furniture witharbitrary design.The increasing importance of environmental issues is driven by regulation and is fosteredby customers’ awareness (still limited but increasing trend). In order to effectively respondto environmental challenges, a comprehensive approach is required: environmentalissues need to be taken into account from the product concept and design phase,through procurement, production and post-sales, until de-manufacturing. Thiscomprehensive approach allows more efficient sourcing and usage of raw materials. Therole of e-business is mainly in supporting the concurrent engineering process, with acomprehensive approach that follows the global environmental impact of the product, asdemonstrated by business examples presented in section 3.1.3.e-Marketing and salesThe diversity of ICT systems and of competences is a major hurdle to integration,especially in the downstream part of the value chain. e-Business integration is still lackingbetween manufacturers and independent distributors, due to the characteristics offurniture distribution networks and to complexity of industrial categorisation and coding.The main challenge is to manage alternative product distribution mechanisms andresources effectively in complex and fragmented distribution networks. e-Marketing ande-sales activities towards final customers are still limited in this sector and are aimed atproviding technical and commercial information rather than actual e-commerce functions.Web catalogues as the most used web-based application, they may be used as a kind ofcustomer service and are not always integrated with ordering and production/distributionsystems. The Webmobili case study (section 5.8) e.g. illustrates the technical challengesrelated to the standardisation of the product classification for the purpose of e-commerce.Furniture manufacturers (and retailers) may benefit from improved interoperability andstandardisation both for integration of business processes and for the development ofB2C and B2C commerce activities.155