From its inception in 1992 as a maker of office chairs in Poland, Nowy Styl has grown to become Europe’s third-largest manufacturer of furniture solutions for offices and public spaces. This growth has been underpinned by the company’s commitment to designing inspiring office interiors and operating highly efficient and modern production facilities.
In addition to organic growth, Nowy Styl expanded through strategic acquisitions in key markets. Starting in 2011, Nowy Styl took over a series of well-known German office furniture companies. Now, Germany represents the company’s largest single market. To become a major participant in the dynamic Turkish market, Nowy Styl took a 50% ownership position with a Turkish production and distribution company. Nowy Styl also made acquisitions in the important Swiss market.
Nowy Styl provides furniture for new office buildings, conference centers, cinemas, stadiums, music, sports and multi-functional facilities. Nowy Styl references include multinational corporations such as DS Smith, Honeywell, Deloitte and ABB, cultural institutions such as the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice and the Munich Opera, as well as stadiums in Poland and France where European Football Championships were held in 2012 and 2016. In six out of the seven stadiums now under construction for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, fans will sit in Nowy Styl seats.
With operations in 16 countries and sales to over 70 nations, Nowy Styl placed an ever-increasing workload on its legacy IT infrastructure, which was, like with so many other rapidly growing companies, built incrementally. The company’s IT footprint evolved to include multiple distributed servers, and system management became more challenging as business demand grew for computing services.
“As we grew, we had a lot of problems with performance,” says Piotr Ziemiański, Deputy IT Director of Nowy Styl. “We had more data to analyze, the system took longer to process reports, and in some cases, people didn’t have all the information they needed to make the right decisions.”
Long data processing times impacted production, one of the company’s most vital business operations. “Our automated manufacturing lines had to wait for data before they could start production,” says Ziemiański. “These delays also impacted our logistics operations, which took more time to prepare products for shipment. We had a lot of problems with this.”
The company’s legacy data storage system also had performance issues. “Our Oracle database system was always waiting for data to come from our storage systems,” says Ziemiański. “There were also security issues because our old storage system couldn’t encrypt the data.”
When Nowy Styl’s management asked the IT department to improve the performance of the system, the search started for a solution that could address the performance issues and prepare the system for future growth and upgrades. “We conducted a thorough analysis of the challenges and made a list of available solutions on the market that could help us,” says Ziemiański. “And because we’ve worked a lot of times with IBM, we asked them to support us.”