MG+BW leverages RSM WorkHub to align IT to the growing business

With business expanding, furniture company increases its insight and efficiency

MG+BW is an eco-friendly, American-made-furniture company that has undergone some significant, positive changes through the years. The company was a private label manufacturer, developing furniture for several well-known retailers, including Pottery Barn, Bloomingdale’s, and Restoration Hardware. The company has recently transitioned into a multichannel retailer, developing its own brand and own label in recent years with much of the business now coming from custom furniture built.

In any industry, as organizations grow and volume increases they can lose visibility into key processes. Success brings product and location expansions which can overwhelm manual or outdated functions. Ultimately, this causes companies to lose visibility, efficiency and control. In many of these cases, technology solutions and enhanced automation can often step in and bring better stability and clarity to the situation.

MG+BW is an eco-friendly, American-made furniture company that has undergone some significant, positive changes through the years. The company was a private label manufacturer, developing furniture for several well-known retailers, including Pottery Barn, Bloomingdale’s and Restoration Hardware. However, the company has recently transitioned into a multichannel retailer, developing its own brand and own label in recent years with much of the business now coming from custom furniture built in a nearly 1,000,000-square-foot modern factory in Taylorsville, North Carolina.

Challenges related to growth

MG+BW’s chief technology officer, Rob Bogan, began at the company early in this period of growth and recognized some challenges with how IT issues were handled. The company had an IT tracking system, but it needed better clarity around its service levels to ensure departmental accountability. In addition, the company required more robust reporting, alerts and notifications, along with details into overall workload and work intake.

“In my first few weeks, I saw the emails and the requests—there were so many ways that the technology team was being hit up to do things and I had no visibility into what was going on,” said Bogan. “Were we working on the right things? We needed to bring some more sanity to the process and add some structure.”

Looking forward to the company growing further and becoming more complex, Bogan recognized that a management tool was necessary to increase visibility, governance and prioritization within the IT function. He had previous experience with ServiceNow at a large retailer but thought the workflow solution might be out of reach for MG+BW.

However, after RSM US LLP conducted an IT assessment, RSM WorkHub, powered by ServiceNow, was suggested as a platform that could help address MG+BW’s IT management challenges.

“I didn’t even think of ServiceNow because I thought it was out of our price range,” said Bogan. “But when I started having conversations with RSM, I was very surprised. I thought ‘wow, this could be something we could implement and adopt.’”

A new solution transforms the IT function

MG+BW worked with RSM to implement RSM WorkHub, leading to significant benefits for the company. The solution has consolidated IT service management and strategic portfolio management (SPM) applications into a single platform, centralizing workflow and eliminating disparate systems.

Following the implementation, MG+BW now has a first-class IT service management system where it can manage its intake not only by inbound email, but also by a client-facing service portal with a service catalog. Users can submit incidents, project requests, enhancement requests, onboarding requests and new desktop requests with ease. Tickets are routed through RSM WorkHub to the appropriate departments for more streamlined project management, while enhanced reporting and service-level agreement creation brings accountability to the department and enables the appropriate setting of expectations.

“As we got into the ServiceNow functionality and implemented it, the platform is so much richer than it was previously,” commented Bogan. “Especially when we got into the IT business management module—it’s just shocking how deep and how much functionality there is now.”

From an IT team perspective, employees now can manage their work in one place. They also can now manage their yearly planning through ideation and manage their ad hoc project intake process through demand management. More robust assessments and prioritization capabilities align to the company’s strategic framework, ensuring IT is supporting the entire organizational vision.

"RSM offers an enterprise-grade solution at an attainable price point,” said Bogan. “They demystified the complexity of ServiceNow and gave us what we needed to understand our IT workload and streamline our project management processes.”

Supporting the ongoing evolution of IT

Ultimately, the RSM WorkHub solution has given MG+BW the ability to manage all its IT work in one place and a clear vision into whether resources are underallocated or overallocated in certain areas.

In addition, with the new emphasis on IT optimization, MG+BW has established an IT steering committee. At those monthly meetings, Bogan uses the insight and data from RSM WorkHub to report on the tickets IT has for the month and how they are classified, demonstrating the value of the function to stakeholders.

“It’s been an awakening, which I knew it would be,” said Bogan. “We are seeing benefits in terms of the workload; we’re starting to see patterns in data to identify problem areas and email has come down because users can simply update a ticket. So, yes to productivity, yes to visibility, yes to workload, and yes to prioritization and escalation.”

With RSM WorkHub, MG+BW has the foundation to begin looking toward additional resource management in other areas of the business. The company plans on building out the SPM module further, including gaining a greater understanding of time management and the breakdown of operational versus project work. With the success of the platform, discussions are ongoing to determine where its functionality can be further utilized.

After implementing the new workflow solution, MG+BW has broken down barriers between IT and the business, enabling greater communication and collaboration. The IT department is now in greater alignment with organizational goals and is more proactive with solutions and less reactive to problems, providing greater value and efficiency, and becoming more of a strategic partner to the business.