Call Center Furniture Manufacturer Interior Concepts Wins 2010 TMC Labs Innovation Award

By Patrick Barnard, Senior Web Editor, TMCnet

Call center furniture manufacturer Interior Concepts has won a 2010 TMC (News - Alert) Labs Innovation Award from Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, Technology Marketing Corporation’s print publication focused on the call center and CRM industries.

Interior Concepts won the award in recognition of its use of ICE solutions to create an interactive quoting and design program capable of presenting custom furniture products in an understandable way to clients. With ICE as its technology platform, Interior Concepts’ system automatically engineers the product, determines material needs, and generates paperwork and computer code to facilitate the manufacturing process. These factors improve quoting and presentation of projects, and reduce engineering time.

The company says the implementation of ICE Software and ICEvision has resulted in it being able to carry out quotation revisions 75 percent faster; improvements to engineering time by more than 500 percent; and reductions in machine programming time for manufacturing by 200 percent. Interior Concepts notes that $500,000 can already be attributed to sales from presentations and the abilities of the new system.The software is also a great marketing tool because Interior Concepts can now show clients what the furniture will look in a facility before it is manufactured. In addition it allows the company to post animated Virtual Tours of designs on its website.

In addition to the launch of its new design and manufacturing software, Interior Concepts has made a number of other improvements to its products and services during the past six months, including becoming certified as a low emitting furniture product. The company, which manufactures all of its call center furniture in its own factory in Spring Lake, Mich., has introduced a number of new colors and finishes to stay up-to-date with the latest trends. In addition it has added many new storage and ergonomic solutions to provide customers with an even better product.

One such ergonomic advancement is its new sit-to-stand workstation, which significantly reduces the incidence of repetitive motion claims in call centers with more than 750 agents.

The company has also added a number of new panel inserts and overhead storage units to meet a variety of needs.

“Our strongest feature, however, is our ability to meet a variety of needs, which differ by customer on a daily basis, to provide each of our customers with the exact design for their space, function, and budget,” said Marketing Manager Jennifer Way. “By doing this, we design and provide new products every day to meet the ever changing customer needs.”

(source: http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/call-center-furniture/articles/96081-call-center-furniture-manufacturer-interior-concepts-wins-2010.htm)