Global Furniture Group is a leading North American manufacturer and supplier of professional furniture solutions, founded in 1966. With an extensive range of solutions for workplaces, healthcare, education and government, they serve organisations worldwide through a strong network of dealers and partners.
On paper, it started as a technical challenge. Global Furniture Group's CRM had been running locally on its own servers for almost ten years and could no longer be updated. Without updates, it was gradually becoming a security risk. Moving to the cloud was therefore not a luxury, but a necessity.
But a closer look revealed that technology was the smallest part of the problem. Over the years, the system had been modified so many times that it had lost its direction. Dozens of additional fields, endless lists, features that had once been added but that most users didn't even know existed. The CRM had essentially become one thing: a tool for approving discounts.
For more than a hundred salespeople, this had become a daily burden. Administration still had to be done in the evening, after a full day on the road. Orders were delayed. Everyone had found their own way of working with the system, resulting in as many different ways of working as there were users.
From the very beginning, we knew that a technical migration alone would never be enough. More than a hundred people needed to feel that they had genuinely been listened to. That required a different approach.
Together with Global Furniture Group's sales team, we organised a series of workshops in which users demonstrated their own ways of working, evaluated demos and worked through different scenarios. We literally asked them to work with the new system so we could see where they encountered difficulties.
Two insights kept coming back. First, the sales team was spending too much time on administration instead of customers and actual selling. The new system had to reduce that burden, not increase it. Second, sales teams sometimes collaborate on shared projects, and the system needed to make that easy whenever the situation required it.
Moving a large group of people to a completely new system requires more than a technical implementation. That is why change management was central from day one. Not as an afterthought, but as the foundation.
Based on these insights, we built a new cloud environment on Microsoft Dynamics 365, fully tailored to how the sales team actually works.
Projects can now be managed centrally, even when multiple dealers or regions are involved. The system automatically detects when duplicate information is about to be entered and helps teams keep everything structured. Large quotations can be created easily, discounts are calculated automatically and follow a clear approval process before they are sent.
Information from other systems, such as the product catalogue and customer data, is synchronised automatically, so no one has to maintain the same data in two different places. And everything is also accessible on the go, via mobile.
Global Furniture Group's employees now have one central environment for their opportunities, quotations, dealer contacts and project information. No more personal workarounds, no more manual searches, no more administration waiting for them at the end of the day.
The real change isn't the move to the cloud. It's in the user experience: from a system that created work to one that takes work away. The CRM is once again a tool that supports sales, rather than an administrative obligation at the end of the day.
