Morgan Furniture

Morgan Furniture manages the following brands in New Zealand:

• La-Z-boy
• Domani
• Ferucci

And in Australia:

• Jason
• La-Z-boy

John Dashwood, Managing Director of Morgan Furniture, says “Logistics is our strength. It has to be. We handle three or four thousand standard containers a year.”

“Everything is integrated,” says John. “The old manual system needed five people to run it. With Infomace, it takes only one. Infomace takes care of our bar coding, price lists, labels, logistics processing, workflow, financials and the dealer website: everything we need. We are known throughout Australasia as having the best IT in our industry.”

Infomace’s relationship with Morgan Furniture, the leading supplier of upholstered furniture in Australia and New Zealand, dates back to 1993, when Infomace first implemented its full Financial Suite.

Since then the suite has been tailored and enhanced to provide the most comprehensive of financial, accounting and operational software. It functions on a hardware and networking infrastructure linking all of Morgan’s activity in New Zealand, Australia and Asia.

“Liaison between our companies includes software systems support, full Facilities Management and ongoing I.T. consultancy services,” says Steve Millington, Infomace Director/General Manager.

Morgan Furniture comes close to the ideal of a “virtual company”, in that nearly all of the physical processes are contracted out: manufacturing, shipping, land transport, showrooms and retailing are all done by other companies. Morgan does, however, have its own wholesale warehouses in Sydney, Perth and Tauranga. “We have seamless communication between our head office in Albany (Auckland) and our main distribution centre in Tauriko (Tauranga),” adds John.

“The main focus is on ‘intangibles’, information rather than physcial objects:

• marketing
• logistics
• pricing
• planning
• conceptual design, and
• relationships with other companies.”

Since information really is their most valuable resource, Information Technology is the backbone of their business, and we are very proud that all Morgan’s IT (hardware, software, communications and services) is provided by Infomace International.

Esra Dreyer, Morgan Chief Financial Officer, says that: “Timely information, and the format in which it is presented, is a key to the efficiency and reliability of the whole organisation’s activity.”

Later this year John and Esra will be working with Infomace to introduce “Sales and Financial Forecasting” tools to the Morgan logistics operation.