Reaching the global market.

• Author: GOULIQUER, DIANNE

Firm offers clients opportunity to design a custom office with the click of a mouse

It has been nearly 20 years since partners Heinz Dittmann, Helmer Pedersen and Helmut Moeltner first opened the doors to Three H Furniture Systems in New Liskeard.

Since then the company has evolved from a residential furniture supplier to a specialized commercial furniture manufacturer and a technology leader.

Three H Furniture Systems was recently handed a Northern Ontario Global Traders Award of Merit for its use of new technologies. Specifically, the award recognized the development and implementation of the company's IQ2000 office layout and specification software which allows customers to quickly design a custom office layout and submit their designs to Three H Furniture over the Internet. The company conducts a review of the layout's technical merit and the products required, and then responds to the customer with a three-dimensional model and a finalized price quotation.

"We're using some software that we developed in-house that allows customers to configure an office arrangement with our products very easily without them having to really know the product," Roy Dittmann, vice-president of systems, says. "From there, they can email their work to us and it's automatically handled; it's received into our system and checked by our staff to make sure they haven't made any mistakes or that there aren't ergonomic problems. That can be processed through our entire system and produced."

The software has given Three H an advantage over the competition and has even snagged new business.

"We have a very technical product that can be intimidating for a lot of customers," Dittmann says, "We're very unique in our line; we make an infinite number of products that can be sized to fit the exact size of the room. With that flexibility though it becomes much more complicated to design a system. With the software, we've tried to take some of that intimidation away and make it fairly simple for a person that doesn't have a lot of (technical) skills in office layout to be able to configure our furniture comfortably.

"That's probably the biggest advantage, and it has assisted us. We've just recently got a customer on board...and we got that...