Narbutas — developing a business furniture planning platform to get a competitive edge
The background:
Narbutas is a Lithuania-based company that has operates on a global footprint across 66 countries. The company focuses on B2B segment, designing and crafting furniture tailored for contemporary workspaces.
The company struggled with a significant challenge for years: their salespeople manually prepared business furniture plan proposals and calculated prices. This process consumed a lot time and effort, leading to high costs. To overcome this issue, they decided to act and approached us to develop a business furniture planning platform.
Aim of the project:
From the start, the client envisioned a interactive 3D furniture planner similar to the one offered by IKEA, but for business clients. They wanted a platform allowing employees to quickly and efficiently plan various work areas, be it an office, factory, conference room, or airport.
We aimed to develop a web-based platform featuring a user-friendly interface that enables users to easily assemble components from Narbutas’ extensive catalog, along with the ability to fully customise furniture by selecting colors, textures, accessories, etc.
We integrated nearly all other Narbutas IT systems into the platform during development. We also synchronized it with the company’s product catalogs to ensure that furniture component prices and parameters were always up to date. Ultimately, we connected the platform with the client’s accounting system to facilitate invoice generation for proposals.
Over the course of three years, amounting to about 15,000 hours of coding, we successfully transformed the client’s vision into reality. The furniture planner has a 3D mode that allows users to visualize projects from any angle.
The planner also makes it easy to tweak offers during client meetings. Users can quickly check measurements, calculate detailed price estimates, and send PDF proposals with just a few clicks of a button.
Following the launch, the platform gave Narbutas a significant edge over competitors. It incorporates most of the features found in IKEA’s planner, but we have developed it on a considerably smaller budget.
Services provided:
- Analysis and planning.
- Integrating Narbutas’ various systems into the platform.
- Designing and developing software.
- Building and integrating a 3D engine.
- Providing post-launch support.
Project result:
The Narbutas furniture planning platform has become the go-to resource for most non-factory employees across all 66 countries in the company. It has significantly reduced the time and costs involved in creating proposals.
We launched the platform in the spring of 2021, and it continues to be used just as effectively today, with no major changes needed. That stands as a testament to the quality and durability of the products we develop.
