Alex Schuster began “Pine Valley Furniture” (PVF) as a hobby. Initially, Alex would build custom furniture in his garage for friends and family. As word spread about his quality craftsmanship, he began taking orders. The hobby has since evolved into a medium-sized business, employing more than fifty workers. PVF   specializes in Residential   and   Commercial furniture, and its customers ranging from individuals to small and medium businesses.
PVF’s main business is to build furniture from raw material, sell and ship furniture to customers which includes work done by sales staff, managers, building furniture in the warehouse and procuring raw materials from the suppliers when required, when a customer buys a Residential or commercial furniture. Each furniture transaction requires a lot of standard communication to be sent to buyers, suppliers and furniture workshop, and most importantly - managing deadlines.

PVF’s business processes are manual, including the creation of customer’s contacts, accepting payments and issuing receipts, as well as generating letters to furniture workshop and ordering raw materials from suppliers. Customer’s, Supplier’s  details are maintained using a spread sheet, and appointments to see the furniture’s  and to see the raw materials were maintained in Microsoft Outlook.
All customer and suppliers files at this initial stage are paper based and staff often spends hours searching for a particular file. Once the customers or suppliers file is found, additional time is spent looking for documents within the particular file. Sometimes files would go missing and then reappear after a few days. In addition to this, the Income Tax Office requires that the file from closed sales had to be kept on the PVF’s records for 5 years.

Current System / Processes –Furniture Transaction

For  a  standard  furniture  transaction  that  involves  selling  a  furniture,  the  current  processes followed by PVF are as follows:-

1. A customer comes to the shop. A nominated salesperson looks after him.   
2. If customer likes a furniture he then contacts and notifies the salesperson of the purchase of a furniture.
3. PVF staff immediately open a file for the new customer.
4.  A Furniture search is performed at that stage to ensure that the furniture details are entered correctly and furniture is available in the warehouse to be delivered immediately.
5. If Furniture is not available in the warehouse a special note is made, staff then sets deadlines in Microsoft Outlook to ensure that they can track the deadlines when furniture will be ready and delivered. (Warehouse checks if the raw materials are available for the furniture. If not then requests the staff to order raw materials from the suppliers).
6. PVF staff then issues an invoice and forward the invoice to the customer for payment and
signing. The method of payment can be cash, cheque, or EFTPOS. The details of the cheque are entered.
7.  PVF staff then orders the furniture from the warehouse.
8.  Warehouse gets all the information about the furniture and the customer and organizes sending the furniture to the respective customers.
9.   Warehouse notifies to PVF Shop of sending the furniture to the customer
10. PVF’s Salesperson looking after this sale closes the sale record and archives it for later use.

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