Haworth: Leveraging SAP LeanIX solutions to accelerate global growth through business and IT alignment
Intelligent visualizations that answer complex questions
Haworth needed accurate information on an IT landscape dispersed across multiple regions and entities. Using SAP LeanIX solutions, the office furniture maker created a high-quality IT inventory, accelerated critical financial projects, and fostered global collaboration among business and IT teams, improving agility and planning.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Mill products and mining | Holland, Michigan | 7,500 employees |
Vice President, Global Information Services, Haworth Inc.
Supporting a new business model and harmonizing the brand portfolio
Haworth Inc. operates in 126 countries, serves 650 dealers, and has one vision: to create beautiful, effective, and adaptable workspaces. Its office concepts combine modern design principles with science to build sustainable workspace solutions.
The company has experienced tremendous growth in recent years as a result of two main drivers. First, its workspace product transformed from furniture into integrated technology solutions that support collaboration in a digital world. Second, it acquired a portfolio of brands in Europe and Asia.
Digital transformation and inorganic growth drastically increased the operational demands on corporate IT. High-profile business projects regularly suffered from a lack of transparency across the technology landscape. Manual collection of information was both inefficient and inaccurate, negatively impacting project timelines and budgets. Challenges were especially pressing in finance, where inadequate consolidation after mergers affected daily operations as well as external stakeholders.
The global information applications team led by Gerald Winkler was tasked with providing intuitive access to accurate information about the IT landscape, which was scattered throughout countless Microsoft Office files across all regions and entities.
The existing self-built solutions were rigid and lacked collaborative functionalities. Previous attempts to integrate complex and unwieldy tools had failed time after time, so Haworth began looking for a lightweight, user-friendly solution.
After a decade of global acquisitions, the integration of finance applications was a major imperative for Haworth. Variations in standards, tools, and procedures became a moving target with no way to centralize information. To enable further global growth, the challenges needed solving.
Building the business case for enterprise architecture
Project managers requested an overview of all financial applications, how and by whom they were used, and the other systems they interfaced with. To support this request, the team around Winkler started a pilot project using SAP LeanIX solutions to provide intelligent visualizations of the required information.
It began by aligning company-wide business capabilities with the finance applications that supported them. This gave leaders a “lay of the land” independent from disparate entities and complex processes. Stakeholders across the organization were able to intuitively populate this data into fact sheets in SAP LeanIX solutions, providing immediate access to interactive reports. From there, previously unknown answers to questions such as, “What application is used for billing in Italy, and how does that affect our partners?” could be understood more simply.
After completion of the as-is analysis, project teams were able to create clear road maps in the solutions on how to transform their IT landscape to reach the desired target state.
Having demonstrated success in the finance function, Haworth decided to roll out SAP LeanIX solutions to help it architect additional business units, starting with marketing and sales.
Establishing transparency, reducing complexity, and accelerating growth
Haworth established transparency across the complex finance IT landscape quickly and accelerated projects critical to its global growth. For the first time ever, the business side has access to a user-friendly, intelligent information platform about the IT landscape. Diverse business functions are now collaborating and benefiting from this single source of truth.
As Haworth’s growth and digitalization efforts continue to evolve, SAP remains a trusted partner.