Three locations united by one business system

Pigott, Inc.
Headquarters: Des Moines, Iowa; additional offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport
Employees: 100
Founded: 1942

Pigott, Inc., a full-service commercial furniture dealership, consistently ranks as one of the top dealers in Herman Miller's renowned network. The dealership specializes in four markets: commercial, healthcare, government, and education. Making the best use of all resources and managing operations consistently in the company's three locations and are key challenges for Pigott.

Mo Schreiber, Vice President of Operations, credits the Khameleon system for giving him visibility into operations at each of the company's three sites as well as at the corporate level. "Khameleon is used, fundamentally, by every person in the company," Mo said. All three of the company's locations use the Khameleon system in their daily operations, accessing it via the internet.

The company's go-live date for Khameleon software was June 1, 2002. During the initial setup, Pigott created a financial architecture that made each of the three offices a separate "division" that reported to a corporate office. Mo stated, "I want to roll financials up at the corporate level, but I also want division, department, and job-level reporting." Khameleon's ability to combine performance results from the three operations and then slice the data different ways lets Pigott executives see corporate and division profitability by furniture vendor, product lines, and their own service lines. This gives them key information to use as they make strategic choices.

Pigott uses Khameleon throughout a project's lifecycle, starting by setting up a project as soon as a resource is required. When a quote becomes an order, a project manager is assigned, and Khameleon is used to order product. Khameleon tracks product receipts, issues warehouse pick, pack, and ship instructions, and holds time and cost data for each part of the project. Information from every activity is available for reporting, providing a treasure trove of data to use in managing the business.

Khameleon's project structure gives Pigott's CFO, Tana Nichol, and Mo the tools to view project profitability on many levels. In one case, a project involved outfitting a five-story building so it contained multiple activities, orders, and project subsets. Khameleon has the ability to attach jobs and activities, which made all the details of the project available. That allowed Mo and others view progress on design, installation, and other activities as well as the costs attributable to the different stages.

The internet access gives everyone access to Khameleon: from their offices, on site, on the road, or at home, at any time. Because everyone uses the same business processes set up in Khameleon, it's easier for people in different offices to support each other when projects require additional resources or when people are out for vacations or other reasons.

Pigott has found the Service Desk effective in managing all service requests. If a customer wants to demo a chair not usually stocked, for example, an incident is set up in Khameleon. The person assigned expedites the chair, and when it's received, the incident transfers to the service department who is responsible for it until the chair comes back from the customer site. Using Khameleon, Mo can see how many such incidents are open and how much product is on loan at customer sites.

When speaking of Khameleon, Mitch Rutenbeck, Information Systems Manager, said "once it is set up, it's a very powerful tool." He described the importance of understanding "from a process point of view, what it does for the business" and of top-down management support for the changes. Mitch suggested implementing Khameleon in "small bites," picking the mission-critical functionality first. "When that's solid, go on to the next."

Mitch described the Khameleon team as "very easy to work with; very helpful" and describes the relationship between companies as very positive. Both Mo and Mitch encourage companies looking for a business system to learn about Khameleon to see how the company's integrated system can improve their businesses.