by Systems, data and workflows exist across the organization, but they don’t move cleanly through it
Every conversation I have with furniture manufacturers eventually arrives at the same place: We’re moving, but not fast enough. Not for lack of trying. Not for lack of spending. Something structural is slowing them down — and it doesn’t resolve itself simply by investing more in technology.
That observation drove me to design the pAIn Survey — a structured research initiative built around direct conversations with CEOs, CMOs, CIOs and operational leaders across the industry. We gathered input from more than 50 executives representing over 30 leading furniture brands, asking them plainly: Where does execution break down?
The pattern that came back was consistent, and worth sharing widely.
Investment is not the problem
Business sentiment among respondents was broadly positive last year when the survey was completed in December. Most companies reported plans to maintain or grow their digital technology budgets. ERP upgrades, platform migrations and internal tooling initiatives were already in motion.
And yet execution consistently fell short of expectations. Not because of resistance to change. But because friction accumulated after decisions were made — in the gaps between systems, teams and stages of the product lifecycle.
“We are investing, but everything takes longer than it should. The friction shows up after decisions are made.”
— CEO, U.S.-based furniture manufacturer
The defining pattern was a disconnect between strategic intent and operational follow-through. Identifying where that friction lives is the prerequisite for removing it.
5 friction points that compound each other
The survey identified nine recurring sources of operational drag. Five emerged as the most heavily weighted — and they don’t operate in isolation. They reinforce one another, amplifying the cost of each.
1. Back-end systems and integration
This ranked as the top pain point across company sizes and business models. Legacy ERPs, partially migrated platforms and custom infrastructure created environments where data existed but didn’t move cleanly. Information traveled between teams through manual effort rather than connected architecture.
The consequences reached far beyond IT: delayed launches, unreliable analytics and customer-facing failures that originated deep in the back end. The core problem isn’t the age of the systems. It’s the absence of reliable data flow between them.
“Getting data from one system to another takes more effort than it should. That slows everything downstream.”
— CIO, U.S.-based legacy furniture manufacturer
2. Slow onboarding and product launch processes
Manufacturers described a persistent gap between when a product was ready and when it was actually available across the channels that matter — dealer portals, brand websites, sales tools and partner platforms. The product could be designed, priced and ready to ship, and still be weeks or months from market presence.
“A product can be ready months before it actually shows up everywhere it needs to.”
— Head of operations, vertically integrated manufacturer
In a market where speed to revenue increasingly defines margin, the absence of a connected workflow capable of moving a product from internal approval to full channel availability is a measurable cost.
3. Customer service and order-handling overhead
Manual corrections, repeated clarifications and error resolution were common across respondents’ customer service operations. But these were rarely failures of the customer service function itself. They were upstream failures — misaligned product data, configuration logic, pricing and availability — surfacing at the point of least leverage.
When the order specification process lacks rigor early, the cost appears later and in less visible ways: in staff hours, in customer friction, in margin erosion that never gets traced back to its source.
“Customer service ends up compensating for problems that start much earlier in the process.”
— COO, multi-brand furniture manufacturer
4. Analytics and visibility gaps
Leaders across the survey acknowledged making decisions without reliable visibility into what was actually working. Data existed. Usable insight did not — or at least not without a disproportionate investment of manual effort to extract it. Analytics got deprioritized, not because it was seen as unimportant, but because the cost of accessing it was too high relative to the return.
“We do not use data as much as we would like. It exists, but it is not easy to act on.”
— CMO, U.S.-based furniture manufacturer
In an industry defined by product complexity and thin margins, the ability to act on real-time operational and sales intelligence is not optional. It’s a competitive structure. The manufacturers reconstructing last quarter’s picture in spreadsheets are already behind.
5. Content coverage at scale
Content creation cost remained a concern, but the nature of the problem had evolved. The challenge was no longer producing content once. It was maintaining current, channel-appropriate content everywhere products needed to appear — brand websites, dealer portals, marketplaces and designer workflows — simultaneously and continuously.
“It is not just about creating content. It is about keeping it usable everywhere.”
— CMO, U.S.-based furniture manufacturer
This is a distribution and workflow problem as much as a production problem. The volume of channels has outpaced the content pipelines built to serve them.
What the pattern tells us
Taken together, these five friction points are not separate problems. They are different expressions of the same structural reality: systems, data and workflows exist across the organization, but they don’t move cleanly through it.
Back-end disconnection creates delays. Delays compound into launch gaps. Launch gaps create order errors. Order errors overwhelm customer service. And throughout, decision-makers are operating without the visibility to know where the leverage is.
No single investment breaks this cycle. What breaks it is a deliberate reduction of friction at the structural level — connecting the systems, shortening the workflows and building the infrastructure that lets a decision travel through an organization in a timely manner that preserves margins and builds revenue.
The manufacturers who move fastest will not necessarily be the ones who spend the most. They will be the ones who take the constraint inventory seriously — who identify which specific friction points are costing them the most and remove them methodically.
Pawel Ciach is CEO and co-founder of Intiaro, an industry-leading provider of visual commerce and CPQ technology.
