Taylor Howes Designs

Formed in 1991, Taylor Howes is a successful and fast-growing interior design business, which traditionally relied upon several individual spreadsheets to manage each project.

But a single project may involve thousands of items from hundreds of suppliers working in numerous currencies. Factor in the need to track the progress of a project as well as orders, deliveries and alterations, and these spreadsheets can quickly become overly complex and unable to hold the data generated. Duplication of processing data and human error had also become a potentially costly issue.

But at the start of 2007 a far-reaching review of working practices at the firm identified a need for a fundamental change in the way project data was collated, managed and shared.

FileMaker was already in use within Taylor Howes but only employed as a basic purchase ordering and contact records system. MaJic, Platinum member of the FileMaker Business Alliance, was brought in to demonstrate that FileMaker could not only replicate all of the functions currently being handled by its spreadsheets but also could manage the many other complex processes that the business needed to bring under control.