Founded over 40 years ago, Moran Furniture is a highly successful business that specializes in the manufacturing of prestige lounge furniture and furnishing accessories. Moran’s brand is well known in Australia for its top-of-the-line domestic and commercial products.

With manufacturing facilities and headquarters based in Victoria, Australia, Moran Furniture sells via a major reseller network throughout Australia, Asia and the Middle East. Moran Furniture anticipates significant growth over coming years. As part of this expansion, it recognized a vital need to replace its 20-year-old legacy system with a more modern technology platform.

“The company has been operating on an in-house supported, pick-based system that is now over two decades old. As with many such situations, this system was no longer able to provide the functionality, integration or management reporting capabilities required by our business. It did not have the ability to adequately meet our current demands, and we knew it would be very difficult to adapt to support our future needs,” says Dan Pekin, CEO, Moran Furniture. “Investing in a new technology platform became a cornerstone of our plans for the business.”

After a comprehensive evaluation process, Lawson was selected over industry competitors to implement its Java-based application suite.

“Using Lawson Application Suite will greatly increase visibility of information across the business, improve collaboration and ultimately enhance our customer services,” Pekin says.

He continues, “We expect to see significant improvements in production and order tracking capabilities throughout the factory. We are aiming to reduce cycle time from customer order to delivery by more than 60 percent, and to provide a more streamlined sales process while managing our margin performance more accurately.”

“Additional benefits we are looking to achieve include increased visibility across our business with particular emphasis on the total supply chain. This is all aimed at further enhancing the strong relationships we have with the major retailers who carry our brand,” he adds.

“Lawson came out on top in our evaluation, both in terms of product fit and industry experience. Lawson offers tools and functionality that are invaluable to our industry-specific needs—one notable example being the Product Configurator. Moran has designed a range of standard products, but in reality these form the basis of what is a configure-to-order/manufacture-to-order environment. The end product that we manufacture for our customer is a unique variant that is ‘designed’ in real time as part of the sales process. We believe the Configurator will play a major role in helping us manage that process by bringing together the many components and attributes required to make the end product,” Pekin says.

Moran Furniture was also looking for a solutions partner that would not only give it the functionality it needed, but that could also help implement world best practices in furniture manufacturing.

“Lawson also impressed us with the extensive knowledge and experience of our specialist furniture industry. That was vital to us and the Lawson team demonstrated this well, backed up by a strong set of site references that illustrated a proven ability to deliver,” Pekin concludes.

November 2005