Orangebox

Orangebox is a leading UK designer and manufacturer of office furniture. It is renowned for its innovation, simplicity of design and environment awareness. The business was founded in 1973 and was initially a contract manufacturer for Swiss Giroflex furniture, establishing its production facility in Hengoed, 15 miles north of Cardiff. A management buyout (MBO) in 1998 led by Mino Vernaschi, Orangebox's managing director, started a new chapter of re-invigoration and product investment for the company, which re-branded to Orangebox in 2002. The company has 180 employees with a sales turnover of over £25 million. Challenge Orangebox offers some 82 different ranges of office furniture for its customers from task seating such as office chairs through to meeting chairs, tables, stools, office partitions and meeting pods.  As workforces become more mobile and flexible, this has been reflected in office design and the selection of office furniture. To accommodate this growing trend, Orangebox delivers cutting-edge design, producing furniture which facilitates group working and caters for the 'hot-desk' employee. Orangebox customers want to be able to completely customise their product choice to suit their surroundings. When selecting a chair, customers want the ability to choose the fabric, the type of arm rest, choice of castor etc to tailor to their specific requirements. Orangebox offers some 2000 fabric colours and designs for its seating ranges. Dealing with this sheer complexity of choice is challenging for Orangebox. Therefore the business needed to be able to define all of the possible product combinations. Once a customer makes a selection, Orangebox provides an accurate price for the item which takes into account the costs of all the component parts, manufacturing, marketing and distribution costs as well as allowing for appropriate profit margin levels. If the customer is happy with the configuration of their chosen product and the selling price, Orangebox needs to start the manufacturing process to ensure all the parts and fabric choices are available and in-stock ready for manufacture and despatch to the customer. After the MBO in 1998, Orangebox inherited an in-house product configuration system which was not user friendly and required complex re-programming. As part of the buy-out deal, the licences for the existing software would expire within 18 months of the MBO. So in 1999 Orangebox started a six-month selection process to find a product configuration system which could configure and generate orders, acting as a bridge across its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Solution Ewan Tozer is the Commercial Director for Orangebox and led the selection process for the new product configuration system. The new system would sit alongside its Fourth Shift ERP system. Ewan found it was very difficult to find a suitable product as it was an area where the major software vendors did not really cover. As part of the search, Ewan found out about Eden from Datadialogs. Eden offers a code-free, 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) business solutions development platform which allows complex solutions to be built quickly and efficiently. The team from Datadialogs recommended using Eden as a rules-based integration tool that would enable Orangebox to harness the complexity of the business' product offering and turn it to their advantage. Both Datadialogs and Orangebox are advocates of 'Lean Manufacturing', focusing on elimination of waste and unnecessary processes by getting systems to work together more intelligently.   Datadialogs envisioned using Eden to 'pull' data from the ERP system database which contains all of the details on parts, customer orders, costings and scheduling, with Eden acting as the business rule book for Orangebox.  Datadialogs demonstrated how Eden would configure an order for an office chair using the pre-defined rules. For example, once a customer had decided on the style, fabric type and colour of a chair, this order detail was is now inputted into Eden. From interrogating the ERP database, Eden lists all the parts that make up the chair, whether all of the selected colour and fabric options are available. It also calculates the cost of making the chair, recommended selling price and margin, production time and availability. Beyond this, it also finds the customer details, which contain details of previous history and discount terms etc.  Ewan could see the potential of Eden as an essential business tool for Orangebox. The team from Datadialogs showed the complete flexibility of Eden once rules are defined. It can be used as a business process tool to configure and place customer orders, or as a business intelligence tool to interrogate customer and business trends, and help manage the business through enforcing robust business processes. Datadialogs embarked on a 12-month implementation with Orangebox to deliver Eden, working closely with Ewan and his team to define the business rules that now govern the system. Ewan could see the processes developed on-screen and he understood how the processes were taking shape. Ewan was able to work with the Eden developers to quickly and easily change and amend where required. To be fully engrained as a business tool, Datadialogs ensured it trained many of the Orangebox managers to be confident to use Eden. Even for new recruits starting with Orangebox today, the company allows a couple of days training on Eden to understand how it works as the logic and business rules built into Eden gives real insight into how Orangebox operates. At its core, Eden is used as a product configurator and customer order system, managing the process of defining a customer's order and then merging the order through to the ERP system. Its usefulness has grown to become the essential business intelligence tool for Orangebox, allowing the business to get answers to a host of business questions and then being able to re-define Eden's business rules to enhance the business.   Result Eleven years on and Eden is still going strong and over the years the Datadialogs team have kept the system up to date, but the fundamental processes remain the same. Ewan believes that Eden is essential to help Orangebox compete in the market, as Eden can harness the complexity of its product range and turn it to its competitive advantage by truly offering whatever the customer wants. Eden delivers accurate product configurations which translate into accurate pricing and customer orders, no matter how complex the product is. The configuration and order number generated by Eden runs through the entire manufacturing and distribution process - it is the core identifier. Eden has helped Orangebox to understand and manage its business in a completely new way. Orangebox has devised rules in Eden for a wide range of business processes and costs. For example, Eden calculates transport costs using a rule which takes into account product size, weight, distance to the customer and urgency. Then it determines what the most cost effective transportation option is based on these parameters. Eden is crucial for helping Orangebox make strategic decisions as it enables Orangebox to cross reference any parameter together such as product sales, customers, margin, selling prices, with all data generated in real-time. Ewan Tozer, commercial director, Orangebox, concluded: "I recommend Eden to any business looking to get away from competing on price in their market. Eden allows us to harness our business complexity in an easy-to-use, understandable way and produce usable business management information to help us with tactical and strategic decisions for our business. Eden holds the business rules for Orangebox, which means our processes and procedures are visible to all our Eden users. Eden is a core system for our staff and is relied upon every day. It has ensured knowledge isn't siloed. It holds the rules and these rules can be re-written and improved - we challenge our staff to devise new rules for Eden that will further improve business processes. "We are looking forward to Eden's Java integration which will be starting in 2011, allowing us to offer the flexibility of Eden on-line to our trade customers. In summary, Datadialogs are our business partners. They are certainly not a traditional software company. We didn't buy software, we started with a business need for a product configuration system and this is what Datadialogs built using Eden.  Eden is primarily a business tool which enables you to deliver on your business goals, processes and rules. It integrates with the systems in your business so you can take control of complexity in these processes." Orangebox 3 East Road Penallta Industrial Estate Hengoed Mid Glamorgan CF82 7SU United Kingdom Reference www.orangebox.com

Company Orangebox Ltd Website www.orangebox.com Industry Design, Manufacturing Solution Eden Enterprise Edition Results: 1. Delivered product configurator and customer order point. 2. Integrated existing Fourth Shift ERP system - building on established investment. 3. Achieved end-to-end integration with business rules controls for non-technical business users.  "I recommend Eden to any business looking to get away from competing on price in their market. Eden allows us to harness our business complexity in an easy-to-use, understandable way and produce usable business management information to help us with tactical and strategic decisions for our business."