Haworth Leverages LeanIX to Accelerate Global Growth Through Business & IT Alignment

Haworth operates in 126 countries, serves 650 dealers and has one vision: to create beautiful, effective and adaptable workspaces. Their 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, their workspace product transformed from furniture into integrated technology solutions that support collaboration in a digital world. Secondly, they 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. The effort required to manually collect information was both inefficient and inaccurate, negatively impacting project timelines and budgets. Challenges were especially pressing in finance, as improper consolidation after mergers was affecting daily operations as well as external stakeholders.

A modern information platform for the business

The Global Information Applications team led by Gerald Winkler was tasked with providing easy 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 lightweight, user-friendly solution. That is when Gerald and his team discovered LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM).

Immediate business value

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.

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 Gerald started a pilot project using LeanIX to provide intelligent visualizations of the required information.

They started by aligning company-wide business capabilities with the finance applications that supported each. This gave leaders a “lay of the land” independent from disparate entities and complex processes. Stakeholders across the organization were able to easily populate this data into LeanIX fact sheets, providing immediate access to interactive reports. From there, previously unknown answers to questions like, “What application is used for billing in Italy and how does that affect our partners?” could be understood, simply.

After completion of the as-is analysis, project teams were able to create clear roadmaps in LeanIX on how to transform their IT landscape to reach the desired target state.

Having demonstrable success in the finance function, Haworth decided to roll out LeanIX to architect additional business units, starting with marketing and sales.

Transparency across the complex finance IT landscape was established quickly, and projects critical to Haworth’s global growth were accelerated. For the first time ever, the business side has access to an accommodating, intelligent information platform about the IT landscape. All business functions are now collaborating and benefiting from this single source of truth.

As Haworth’s growth and digitization efforts have continued to evolve, LeanIX has remained a trusted service partner.