Farstrup Furniture Ltd: Managing a complex production
When you sell many thousand chairs and tables every year to individual specifications, you need a system that ties sales, production and delivery together in a continuous, efficient flow. That is exactly what Farstrup Furniture does. Uniconta is not only used for financial management and accounting; it is the backbone of the business concept: building unique chairs for unique people.
Jan Andersen, COO
Farstrup Furniture is located just outside Odense near the Langesø forests. As far back as 1910, the forest supplied timber to the sawmill that started it all. Over time, the enterprise has evolved into a specialist in designing and producing chairs for all purposes—from work chairs to dining chairs, armchairs, senior chairs and much more. What a very large part of the production has in common is that the chairs are made to meet the consument’s individual needs.
“By far the largest part of our sales is customised. We are talking about measurements of the chair itself—leg height, back height, seat size, etc.—but also the choice of upholstery, cushion softness, wood type, stain type, accessories and so on. The number of combinations is almost endless. That requires an extraordinary overview and integrated interaction—from the partner who welcomes the customer in their store to the employee in our production who sends a finished chair on for preparation and delivery,” says Jan Andersen, COO.
International partner network
The orders come in from 131 partners allocated across Europe—81 of them in Denmark, where you can also visit Farstrup Furniture’s mobile chair bus. The partners are specialists in having the conversation with customers. They measure, advise and present options. When all choices are in place, they complete a digital order form that ends up in Uniconta and triggers a sales order that precisely describes the current chair the customer has purchased.
This triggers a chain of integrated functions in Uniconta that ties sales, production and lager together. To start with, variant management defines the options for a given product and ensures, for example, that you do not sell a combination you cannot deliver.
Variant management also calculates a price and defines a bom. Based on this, routes and resource deductions are described in a production order, which describes the sequence of the workflow and the need for machine capacity. However, the complexity of these processes has required their IT partner, Retus, to develop a special solution for Farstrup Furniture at this stage. Based on the bom, Uniconta also activates requirements planning and automatic reordering, which are default functions in the system.
Adjustments for complexity
“In our solution, Retus has added an extra layer to variant management. By default, Uniconta has five overall selection criteria, while we work with seven. Under each overall selection criterion, you can work with an almost unlimited quantity of variants. Given the complexity of our range, it still commands a certain respect to see how large a part of the tasks we can cover with the default functions,” says Jan.
“For an order-producing enterprise, it means a lot to have control of production and to be able to continuously adjust lager and production capacity in line with demand. That minimises delivery time and eliminates the risk of back orders. But most importantly, Uniconta helps us live up to what we are here for: building unique chairs for unique people.”
The classic tasks
Uniconta naturally also handles the classic general ledger tasks at Farstrup Furniture, but it is the unique ability to connect data from the first customer contact to final delivery that Jan values most. His best advice to others is to find the right IT partner.
“If you are a production enterprise, it is important that your IT partner is used to working in specialised production environments and understands the workflows and processes that apply here. That has certainly worked for us.”
