Your products are flexible, elegant and worth every penny. But when it takes a week to customize a proposal for a client, you may never get a chance to prove it. A $3 billion office-furniture maker realizes it must shorten its sales cycle drastically if it wants to survive in an economy in which companies want to auction off their chairs, not buy new ones. One goal in this initiative is to provide top distributors with a tool that, like Herman Miller's z-Axis program, allows them to design and price configurations during a sales call. The company also wants to offer a simpler version on its direct-sales Web site. The sales tool will include the company's entire product line, or about 1,000 items. The Web site, because of bandwidth limitations and the cost of creating each item in 3-D, will be limited to 50 products. Aside from laptops powerful enough to render the graphics, the biggest costs are software licenses and the labor to design the products and create the Web application.

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