OFS × Lumari · Customer story
How OFS Multiplied Sourcing Capacity with Lumari
A global furniture manufacturer with a complex, multi-supplier sourcing operation turned a fragmented, manual sourcing process into an AI-powered system, making RFQ processing 10× faster, doubling the speed of landed-cost comparisons, and giving one sourcing specialist the capacity to handle a team-scale workload.
Results at a glance
- 10×faster RFQ processing
- 2×faster landed-cost comparison
- 2 weeksimplementation time
- 100%supplier adoption
Without Lumari, it would have taken three people to do what one person was able to do by himself. It’s just been a tremendous time saver.
About OFS
OFS is a global furniture manufacturer founded in 1937 and based in Huntingburg, Indiana. It designs and manufactures furniture for workplace, healthcare, education, hospitality, government, and other environments.
Bringing a new product line to market can require sourcing 100s of components across commodities. Each component may be quoted across more than half a dozen suppliers while the sourcing team balances several large projects and a steady flow of smaller requests.
The challenge: Over half the week was disappearing into sourcing administration
Before Lumari, OFS managed RFQs across email, spreadsheets, PDFs, shared drives, and disconnected internal systems. There was no single place to see every open request, which suppliers had responded, what information was missing, or whether the team had followed up. Maintaining visibility depended on buyers keeping spreadsheets, folders, and inboxes synchronized by hand.
Every sourcing event also created another cycle of repetitive work. The team assembled item descriptions and drawings, structured line-item spreadsheets, drafted supplier requests, and repeated the process across every supplier invited to quote. As responses arrived in different formats, buyers manually organized the files and transferred prices, MOQs, volume tiers, freight, tariffs, and other commercial terms into a comparison sheet.
The administrative burden compounded quickly. Comparing just 10 to 15 line items could take more than two hours, while preparing an RFQ could take one to two days. Follow-up meant searching through hundreds of emails and relying on spreadsheets, folders, or memory to know what remained open. Altogether, manual sourcing work consumed 20 to 25 hours per week, more than half of a sourcing specialist’s time.
For Brian, OFS’s VP of Supply Chain, this was a growth and resiliency problem. The time spent “compiling, organizing, and formatting data” limited the team’s agility in responding to supplier and market changes. OFS needed a sourcing operation that could support greater supply continuity, growth, and scale without adding administrative complexity.
The solution: AI agents built around the way OFS and its suppliers already work
OFS wanted to automate work without requiring suppliers to adopt a new portal or rigid process. A portal based system relied on supplier adoption and still left the majority of the work fragmented across emails and other systems.
Through Lumari Forge, OFS turned its sourcing knowledge into a live operating model. Forge is Lumari’s proprietary procurement operating layer. It connects the systems where sourcing work already happens, creates a live model of supplier signals, RFQs, quotes, and decision history, and applies company-specific playbooks so agents can take governed action.
For OFS, that meant Lumari’s agents could operate according to the company’s own approval paths, category rules, escalation logic, and supplier communication practices instead of forcing the team into a generic workflow.
- OFS imports item lists and drawings in seconds, and Lumari drafts the supplier request using the project context.
- The team sends to multiple suppliers with one click, then suppliers continue responding through their normal email, spreadsheet, or PDF process.
- Lumari monitors every open request and follows up using custom timing rules that can vary by commodity and supplier.
- Incoming quotes are extracted and normalized across prices, MOQs, lead times, volume tiers, tariffs, freight, and other commercial terms.
- Lumari automatically models different quantities, calculates landed cost, and produces an award recommendation, while OFS retains the final decision.
From fragmented inputs to a governed decision
- StartItem list + drawingsAdd project context once
- Send5+ supplier requestsSend once across suppliers
- ReceiveEmail · XLSX · PDFSuppliers keep their tools
- NormalizeDecision-ready quotesPricing, terms, freight, tariffs
- DecideLanded-cost scenariosOFS keeps award authority
No portal, onboarding, template, or process change was required from suppliers at all.
The first live RFQ made the impact concrete: more than 20 steel components quoted across 5+ suppliers. Instead of rebuilding the event in a spreadsheet and drafting five emails, OFS imported the items and the agents handled the rest.
Having the ability to send out a quote to five different suppliers at the same time instead of typing out five different quotes to five suppliers has reduced the amount of time drastically.
The result: Faster execution and better sourcing decisions
OFS transformed RFQ execution from a chain of manual handoffs into a scalable operating model where supplier information becomes decision-ready as it arrives. Instead of typing hundreds of cells, the sourcing team reviews the extracted data, resolves exceptions, and moves to analysis.
Automated follow-up also shortened response cycles. The agent keeps track of who still owes a response and knows when to follow up, which Kaleb said has “saved days on getting quote requests back.”
During one especially demanding stretch, one sourcing specialist was able to take on what had previously been a team-scale workload. Lumari handled the “compilation of the data,” sending requests, collecting responses, and “keeping track of who owes us what,” leaving the team free to focus elsewhere.
With the relevant information collected and structured automatically, OFS can apply its sourcing judgment at a much greater scale.
The overall quote comparison, collection, and organization process has not changed at a high level. We implemented our processes into Lumari agents, and it turned all the manual work into automated work. It reduced our processing time tenfold.
The team can now compare suppliers at a selected volume, distinguish unit price from landed cost, identify missing information, and review the AI recommendation. OFS still weighs tooling, MOQ, lead time, logistics, inventory exposure, supplier capability, and new-product requirements before making the award.
Historical RFQ data is searchable without sorting through inboxes, spreadsheets, shared-drive folders, and PDFs. Every sourcing event now adds to OFS’s institutional knowledge, giving the team greater visibility across suppliers and categories and a stronger foundation for future decisions.
The time required to compile, structure, and execute an RFQ has compressed dramatically. The automation has improved our consistency, responsiveness, and overall sourcing resource capacity. The tool has also enabled more effective use of our historical RFQ data.
Hands-on partnership from idea to execution
Brian joined an early progress meeting expecting a discussion about what the team planned to build. Instead, the sourcing team demonstrated a working agent.
The speed from idea to working system expanded the conversation from just sourcing to how agents could support OFS’s broader growth.
Being able to demonstrate a functional tool after such a relatively short development period changed the scope of the conversation with our executive team and clearly reset expectations surrounding these types of initiatives.
Building the agents also surfaced opportunities to strengthen OFS’s underlying processes. If the team could not align on how to train an agent, that often revealed a procedure or data issue that needed clarification for people too. Lumari became both an automation layer and a mirror for continuous improvement.
OFS credits the results not only to the product, but also to the implementation partnership. Lumari learned the company’s processes, adjusted features around live sourcing events, joined calls as questions arose, and worked with the team in person at its Huntingburg facility.
The incredible responsiveness and genuine commitment to our success has stood out. The Lumari team operated as an extension of our team. Whenever we needed a feature adjustment or ran into a unique workflow issue, their turnaround time was unmatched.
Built to scale with OFS
OFS began with a focused objective: make complex, multi-supplier RFQs faster and easier to manage. With that process now operating through Lumari, the team has a foundation for extending the same agent-driven model across more sourcing and procurement work.
The impact on scalability in response to future growth was the key standout.
Lumari gives OFS more capacity to evaluate suppliers, manage risk, support new-product development, and move the business forward without scaling administrative work alongside it.