Digital Ancillary Aggregator Platforms
Tangram utilizes two market-leading platforms to help research, organize and specify our ancillary selections. By partnering with Design Public Group and utilizing the Steelcase Marketplace platform, our teams have access to a wide array of products that provide adverse offering. Ultimately, this creates a competitive opportunity between manufacturers to offer the best price.
Steelcase Marketplace
Design Public Group
Smart Tools Designer
We utilize the most powerful furniture design program available on the marketplace, CET. CET cuts typical design time in half from traditional CAD-based software specification, and makes revisions and updates incredibly easy. Bottom line: This means less expense to the client. Additionally, our designers have the capability to react live to changes while sitting with client stakeholders at working meetings. The ability to “design on the fly” is a significant time/cost advantage and adds to our customers’ overall experience.
Manufacturing Preparation
In conjunction with these “customer-facing” documents, we send information to Steelcase which allows them to plan for efficient manufacturing once the orders arrive. We call these documents “delivery planning reports.” They highlight the counts, weights, and volume of the pieces on the prospective order. By seeing this information ahead of time, Steelcase is able to coordinate raw materials, manufacturing space, and logistics to better align with the project schedule requirements.
Quotation and Ordering Tools
Our enterprise business software, Hedberg, is responsible for executing the majority of our company’s functions. On the front end, we use the software to issue quotations for order to our clients. While the quoting function is powerful in itself, we often augment it with a more visually friendly spreadsheet representation. The spreadsheet format also allows us (and our clients) to extrapolate pricing data in whatever way is needed for the project. During client presentations, this tool proves its use. We can implement different options, items, and quantities and see the effect on budget in real time. Post-meeting, we can convert these changes back into Hedberg. As a result, turnaround times for budgets are greatly reduced.
Post-Order Tracking
After order placement, we track our progress towards delivery through the Arrival Delivery Report (ADR) and Web tracks systems. These systems link our MM Partner’s powerful SAP driven infrastructure to our “Enterprise Business System.” This allows us to diagnose any manner of issues relating to the delivery coordination of the project well ahead of time. For example, we use ADR to sequence the order in which products are received. For instance:When installing workstations, the panels must arrive first, followed by the storage, and finally, the work surfaces and accessories. ADR allows us to easily sequence our deliveries,color-code them by floor/area/building, and manage the timing of each delivery with theclick of a button.
