PMC Commercial Interiors Leveraged the Right System and Right Solution Partner to Scale Their Operations
About PMC Commercial Interiors
The PMC Commercial Interiors story is one of adaptation and growth in the ever-competitive office contract furniture industry. The last decade includes the addition of three distribution centers, a new PMC Collaborative Technologies division, and an additional five locations. Today, PMC creates “workspaces that work as hard as the people in them.” They are also the recipient of the “Best in Class Haworth Dealership” for the last 4 years.
Challenge: Lack of Scalability
- The inability of financial segmentation: After Harry Chalker purchased PMC Commercial Interiors, he looked for ways scale in order to open a third location (and more).
- Delays in reporting slowing business decisions: To send invoices, clunky scripts had to be run overnight, and reports had to be manually checked because they were only generated in PDF format.
- Too many manual processes: “Customer records were being entered in at least twelve different places, per order”
- Missing the ability to segment customers: All orders, no matter how large or small, were treated the same.
- Clunky UX (User Experience): Hindered attracting top talent.
Solution: ERP Implementation with Big Bang
After a year-long investigation in 2015, PMC chose to move forward with NetSuite ERP “to have the platform of the future (for self procurement) and to differentiate” because the other furniture software was not able to provide the flexibility for PMC to grow. Additionally, PMC knew they would invest in customer portals so they wanted to make sure that the cloud solution had open APIs. They also valued the usability of NetSuite as they wanted to attract top talent who would be mobilized more eagerly with and a modern UX interface.
Results
- Streamlined operations allowing PMC to grow to 6 locations
- Customer segmentation with “predefined paths”
- “Everybody has the same pane of glass” thanks to greater transparency, inventory control, and real-time insights available when needed
- Automated processes and reduction in the transaction cost, for both PMC and the customer
- A system that allows PMC to achieve their technology roadmap for the coming years – with the right partner (Big Bang) to help them get there
“Big Bang speaks furniture.”
– Jonathan Whitehouse, IT Director at PMC
