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• E-Factories

Unfinished BusinessAs is the case with many Old Dominion manufacturers, the Internet hasn’t yet infiltrated the factory floor at Frank Chervan Inc. The Bedford company makes a line of about 100 high-end, exposed-wood chair and seating frames, which it sells unfinished to small and midsize manufacturers as well as interior designers and decorators.

Even so, the company has dabbled in the online world. The fastest-growing segment of the furniture maker’s business has been direct sales to upholsterers. But President Greg Terrill knew many of his small customers didn’t have the resources to do their own Web and marketing work. A second challenge was that his customers’ potential clients had seen his firm’s furniture and would call him directly and ask where they could buy and have them finished. Terrill wanted them to buy his chairs, but he didn’t want to become an intermediary. “We didn’t want to refer them over the phone,” Terrill says. And he didn’t want to show favoritism.

By putting referral information online in a program called FrameLink, Terrill gave his customers equal access to buyers and gave buyers ready access to the information they required. Terrill started the program in the spring; eight of his customers have links up and running, and more links are in the works.

Using the Internet, Terrill is also able to give upholsters and small manufacturers easy access to marketing information. “Customers were forever cutting up our catalog,” Terrill says. He’d have to send more. Now they can download ready-to-use marketing material, with room to plug in their own logo and contact information. “I don’t have to pay printing or mailing. It’s all free,” Terrill says.

Maybe not free, but almost. “I’ve been doing a lot of the Web programming,” the 28-year-old Terrill says. He also brought on a high-school student to do some of the work. Most of the materials to provide the content — spec sheets and photographs — were already available, as the company uses them in its printed catalog.

Beyond marketing, the Internet has helped the manufacturer communicate globally. Frank Chervan purchases some of its manufacturing equipment offshore through an Italian company called Balestrini, whose products are used in the many machining operations it takes to make one frame. “It’s a type of machine you can’t get in the U.S.,” Terrill says. “Over the past two years, we’ve been purchasing a lot more equipment from them and working on more complex projects.” Communication via the Internet has helped facilitate those transactions.

Terrill admits there’s more his company can do to exploit the Net. When Frank Chervan’s catalog went online, for example, potential overseas buyers came knocking. “We started getting leads from Bahrain, Egypt, all over,” he says. But the company wasn’t ready to go global. “They’re interested in ordering, but we just keep pushing it father back on the priority list.” For Frank Chervan and others, it seems going online is like the manufacturing process itself: one step at a time.

— Leigh Anne Larance