3.22.05 | Metropolis | Alice Bieneman, an interior designer contracted to Evanston Northwestern Healthcare (ENH), in suburban Chicago, can outfit a new medical office from her desktop. Her employer dictates the colors and surfaces she can use, but Bieneman controls the installation. Using a database that looks and works a lot like Amazon or eBay, she selects furniture from ENH's stock, in remote warehouses. Bieneman wastes less time, her colleagues in warehouses waste fewer trips, and ENH wastes less inventory--all thanks to PinPoint, a software program from Iowa-based furniture manufacturer Allsteel. "If I'm trying to create a certain look and I have products available in standard finishes," she explains, "I can put that in a cart and quote [a price for] the balance." Bieneman estimates that in 2002--the year it adopted PinPoint--the health-care company saved as much as a million dollars by avoiding redundant purchases.

If you are looking for another handsome volume filled with 20th century furniture to place on the Nelson slat bench near your Eames 620 lounger, keep searching. Although it has its fair share of lovingly photographed modern room settings, this coffee table book is actually a compelling history of the Zeeland, Mich., furniture company and its philosophy: "Never to create anything without a purpose but to make everything they create attractive and interesting."  By DAVID KEEPS

2.22.05 | New York Times | WHEN Bob Duncan was studying engineering management at the University of Texas in the mid-1980's, Japanese competition had American businesses terrified. To the confident young Mr. Duncan, however, Japanese manufacturing was not a threat but an inspiration. Within a couple of years, he had an idea for his own company. He decided to do for leather furniture what Japanese companies had done for cars, steel and shipbuilding: shake up a staid, complacent industry by rethinking the manufacturing process. In 1990, with another Andersen consultant, Sanjay Chandra, as his partner, Mr. Duncan set out to turn this concept into a business, the Dallas-based American Leather.  By VIRGINIA POSTREL