Metropolis - April 2012

The Steelcase
global business center in Malaysia
is both nerve center and living
showroom for the company. In the
highest of three wraparound floors—
in an office tower just a few miles
west of the iconic Petronas Towers
in downtown Kuala Lumpur—sales
support and logistics personnel
shepherd orders and inventory
requests from scores of regions;
their open workspace and shared
desks are grouped by region, not by
task. Ad hoc teams take over the
strategically sited flexible spaces
across the floor. Three floors below,
a team of IT professionals works
silently behind a battery of monitors,
keeping the information flow smooth
and constant.

Steelcase has 12 sales offices in Asia and the Pacific. Matt Buckhold, the managing director of the Kuala Lumpur center, says, “Without this facility to prepare orders, investigate finish levels, and provide quotes, each of those offices would need additional staff.” The setup also enables employees to spend more time focused on customers.

The globally integrated enterprise model, based on a network of centers that provide both local expertise and economies of scale, is not Steelcase’s invention; scores of multinational corporations have adopted it. But few companies of Steelcase’s relatively modest heft (it had $2.4 billion in