A major home design and furniture store shipping throughout the US, American Furniture Warehouse offers a huge range of furniture in its showrooms and online store. As the company says, whether customers are decorating one room or a hundred rooms, in traditional or contemporary styles, it has the solutions. Besides satisfying the consumer market, AFW also offers extended services to commercial customers. Hotels, assisted living and retirement communities are all handled by the company’s Commercial Contracts Division. Furniture shipping is available across the 48 continental states of America.

AFW’s busy furniture sales activities also generate many documents. The latest product manuals and promotional information must always be available to sales staff. That means sending or connecting to 12 different locations in Colorado, and also to a further two Super-Center stores in Arizona. Order, sales and accounting reports need to be accessible to management on a secure and reliable basis. The company’s room planner software also generates layouts and plans for commercial customers. These records must be carefully stored, yet easy to access both during the workplace discovery analysis phase and throughout the rest of projects to supply large volumes of furniture.

Besides internal scheduling, organization and collaboration, AFW needs to share files with selected third parties. These are commercial customers who are fitting out their properties with office or lifestyle furniture. They need AFW’s information to complete their own planning and execution. FileCloud was a natural choice for AFW because it brought immediately usable file sharing and synchronization functionality. Furniture manufacturer information, budgets, deliveries and installation time line information could become supplied to all parties concerned, securely, conveniently and on a project-by-project basis. FileCloud’s mobile interface also made it a great choice for salespeople and project managers working on customer sites, as well as delivery and installation staff.

A private cloud solution and FileCloud in particular made sense for American Furniture Warehouse for several reasons. With FileCloud, AFW could deploy security at the right level for each part of the business. The granularity of FileCloud’s security functionality makes it possible for AFW to precisely control access down to individual document level. This is a key feature for confidential internal reports and customer projects. Large furniture layout plans can be conveniently shared by sending a link instead of the document itself. Smart backup software integrated into FileCloud makes sure that data automatically stays safe. That makes it a big help for busy AFW staff and one less thing to worry about while making the business run smoothly.

Naturally, AFW compared different possibilities for file sharing and synchronization. Public cloud solutions and other on-premises software were also scrutinized. The previous solution, a well-known public cloud offering, lacked the control that the company wanted. Other on-site software provided some, but not all of the file sharing functionality that the company required. When it came to being able to securely keep data assets within the company and offer its users all the capabilities they needed, FileCloud was the winner.

FileCloud reduces costs associated with public cloud solutions by up to 80 percent. Bringing the budget down to just one-fifth of previous expenditure is highly attractive to any customer. FileCloud also worked out of the box with AFW’s IT infrastructure. The company could keep its data on its existing file servers and continue to work with its user access management and permissions, just as before. FileCloud did not disrupt AFW operations, but enhanced them from the start.

From its inception in 1975, American Furniture Warehouse has grown to a company with over 2,000 employees. FileCloud will keep pace with further growth in the company too. Eminently scalable, FileCloud works as well for a dozen users as for a million. It also continues to help system administrators manage easily with a host of automated and labor-saving functionalities. As AFW takes on additional supply projects and opens new stores and Super-Centers, FileCloud will be there to support and facilitate these developments.

Whether your company is in the retail, finance, industrial or other sectors, you too could be getting the benefit of FileCloud today. Contact us now and start a 14-day trial free of charge of FileCloud on your own server.