Havic: A Cloud ERP That Knows What Sells

Havic Kantoormeubelen is a Dutch supplier of office furniture: desks, office chairs, meeting tables, storage and everything that goes with them. Its customers are organisations furnishing whole floors as well as small offices replacing a few chairs, and they buy through showrooms, account managers and online.

Behind every order sit the same processes: sales, inventory, purchasing and finance. Before this project, those processes lived in an on-premise setup that did its job but kept each area to itself. Answering a simple question, such as which products sell best to which customers, meant pulling exports and combining them by hand.

We helped Havic transition its ERP to the cloud, with sales, inventory, purchasing and finance running in one system. Every quote, order, delivery and invoice now lands in the same place, the moment it happens.

That one change is what made the rest possible. Once all the data sat together, reporting no longer had to be assembled, and the webshop could learn from every order the business had ever taken.

On top of the ERP we built a reporting layer, so the business could see its operational and financial performance at a glance. The two questions asked most were simple: which office products bring in the revenue, and who are the best customers. Switch between the two views below.

The part we enjoyed most came next. In the old setup, every product page showed the same few bestsellers as suggestions. A customer looking at a meeting table was offered a desk chair and a sit-stand desk, whatever they were furnishing.

With every order in one place, we made the recommendations dynamic. When a customer clicks a product, the system looks at what other customers bought together with it, and suggests those items, ranked by how often they appear in the same order. A meeting table brings meeting chairs, a desk brings a chair and a monitor arm. Click a product below and compare the two.

This was only possible in the new setting. Recommendations like these need every order, current and complete, in one system. In the old setup the data simply was not there to learn from.

A new system only pays off when people use it well. We delivered training courses and materials for the ERP and for the reporting, at two levels: daily users, who need to enter orders and find what they need quickly, and power users, who build their own reports and help colleagues.

• Clean the master data before the move. Products, customers and prices that are wrong on premise are still wrong in the cloud.
• Build reporting on the system itself, not on exports. One source of truth ends the discussion about whose spreadsheet is right.
• Train daily users and power users separately. They need different things, and power users become the team's first line of help.
• Look for what the new setup makes possible, not only what it replaces. The recommendations were never in the plan, and they became the most visible result.

• The transition of Havic's ERP to the cloud, with sales, inventory, purchasing and finance in one system.
• A reporting layer on top of the ERP, with visibility into operational and financial performance.
• Dynamic product recommendations based on what customers buy together.
• Training courses and materials for the ERP and the reporting, for daily users and power users.