The use of 20/20 technologies for kitchen and bathroom design does give The Home Depot an advantage to smaller competitors but the larger competitors (Lowe's, Sears, etc.) are starting to make the transition over to 3-D kitchen planning. Currently, the Home Depot is limited to only kitchen, bath, and home storage design. 20/20 Technologies also carries software for office planning and furniture design. If Home Depot were to add 3-D planning for office planning and furniture design, the consumer who is remodeling or doing any kind of home improvement will naturally want to be able to complete all their design plans in one location. This will further separate Home Depot for their competitors.
The kitchen design process can take anywhere from 2 hrs to three days or more to finalize the kitchen. This is an exhausting process for customers and the designers. Our recommendation is for the Home depot to upgrade the hardware to the ones that runs faster. Home Depot is doing great with one stop shop with showroom POS system, customer can pay their kitchen with the designer; they do not have to wait in line at the checkout.
Since Home Depot has an interaction with contractors and customers, we believe that this could be considered to create one collaboration tool to get information. Having an Asynchronous communication could be a good start point. Information such as: items and styles preferred by the customers in order to their bathrooms and kitchens. Which should help to make better business decisions. Similarly with customers but in that case the employees will use a syschronous communication getting first-hand information. With this information Home Depot could request to its suppliers those items obtaining a competitive advantage in front of old and possibly new competitors.
Home Depot needs to restore trainers of 20/20 design system. It is crucial that employees receive the appropiate training on the program so they can help customers to design. Also provide video live-streaming with DesignCONNECT to allow the customer to collaborate with the employee from their home.
