ARCHBOLD, Ohio — Red Rambler Coffees, a coffee shop in Wauseon that roasts its own blends, faced the ultimate test last week.

A team of efficiency experts from the java-loving metropolis of Seattle was arriving Tuesday in nearby Archbold, Ohio, and Kevin Sauder, president and CEO of Sauder Woodworking Co., wasn’t about to play host without a special custom-blended brew to offer his guests.

But the experts from Amazon.com weren’t in Fulton County to sip coffee.

They were there to help Sauder Woodworking, the North American industry leader in ready-to-assemble furniture, improve its manufacturing techniques, product development, and shipping strategy to better satisfy Amazon, its Seattle-based e-commerce partner.

Nationwide, e-commerce is savaging many bricks-and-mortar retailers, forcing them to cut work forces, close stores, cancel expansion plans, and gut many shopping malls and strip centers.

But less talked about is what online shopping is doing to companies that produce goods that are bought — the manufacturers.

“We’re really now in two businesses,” Mr. Sauder said. “We’re in long production runs [of items] that sell in Wal-Mart retail, Target retail, and Ikea.” And then there is e-commerce, he said, which “really is about more products, more style, more colors, shorter production runs, more emphasis on quick delivery, and finding the best way to get it to the end consumer damage-free.”

Sauder Woodworking’s online sales have more than doubled in a few years, to 35 percent now, up from 15 percent a few years ago. The firm’s chief expects those sales to rise to 50 percent of the firm’s revenue in two years.

Many of the changes required by e-commerce cannot be automated, meaning that privately owned Sauder Woodworking has needed to add employees. As a result, worker productivity — the Holy Grail of manufacturing — has fallen off at the sprawling furniture-making operations that began in Archbold 83 years ago.

“Our production per labor hours has gone down in the last few years because we have to do more handling and shipping of goods,” Mr. Sauder said.

The Amazon.com team came to northwest Ohio to scrutinize the company’s operation and, it was hoped, make Sauder more efficient based on the team’s expertise in dealing with other e-commerce partners.

Over the last five years, as it has courted e-commerce partners, Sauder Woodworking has made changes in its revenue sources and business model.

For decades, Sauder Woodworking’s forte was making bookshelves, entertainment centers, desks, and a variety of other ready-to-assemble furniture pieces that would be sold in stores of business partners such as Kmart, Wal-Mart, Target, and most recently, Ikea.

It would make 1,500 units at a time of a particular unit, put them on pallets, and truck them to the retailer’s warehouse to be stocked later in stores.

Because Sauder could be guaranteed only a minimum amount of store display and shelf space, as it was competing with rival products, it limited the number of overall products it made to those that sold best.

“Every item had to be a home run,” Mr. Sauder said.

But in 2000, Wal-Mart Stores created Walmart.com and a shortly after began selling Sauder products online. Then, sales from Target.com, Amazon.com, and recently, Wayfair.com have added to the mix.

Sauder Woodworking, which employs more than 2,000 workers and is looking to hire 150 more, is grateful for the revenues online sales have opened up. “We’re committed to e-commerce,” Mr. Sauder said.

But the new business has brought changes.

The manufacturer has changed a packing line in its Erie Sauder Distribution Center to handle better packing to products to be shipped to individual customers. The line is now twice as long to allow workers to pack one product while another is being readied for the task.

Because individual employees, instead of forklift drivers, now will be lifting heavy items to ship to consumers under the Amazon or Wayfair label, Sauder is reconfiguring 50,000 square feet of space to add an automated area where it can store products and rapidly retrieve them using robots.

“I can’t say how much, but I can tell you the investment is significant,” Mr. Sauder said.

The company is trying to group similar items together during the manufacturing phase to save time that is normally wasted. For example, workers would use a drilling machine to make parts needing a hole with a specific size. When finished, they stopped to change drill bits before moving on to make a part needing a different size hole.

Whether they made one part or 500, it still takes an hour to change drill bits, Mr. Sauder said.

But now the company can take parts that are different, but which all use the same size hole, and produce them together in one long run, saving time.

Errol Denger, the director of commerce strategy at San Francisco-based Adobe Systems Inc., said manufacturers like Sauder are being forced to rewrite their business model because consumers are demanding a better shopping experience and online retailers like Wayfair and others must differentiate themselves from their online and bricks-and-mortar competitors.

“Think about why Wayfair wants the extra knobs and other options,” Mr. Denger said. Wayfair knows, he said, that its basic products are likely to be the same or similar to products sold on rival Amazon.com, he said, so extra knobs, colors, and other options on products sold by Wayfair separate its products from others.

Mr. Sauder said consumers have become adept at price comparisons while shopping online. “So I know what a 16-ounce bottle of Tide costs, and I’m not going to pay extra for it,” he said. But Wayfair will ask Sauder to add small options and variations to its products, making comparison shopping almost impossible.

In the United States, e-commerce is growing at about 15 percent annually and totals about $425 billion a year, Mr. Denger said. “Amazon actually captures 51 percent of all new e-commerce growth in the U.S., and 24 percent of total retail growth,” he said.

For a company like Sauder, continual adjustments will be needed for e-commerce orders to keep the process efficient and worth doing, Mr. Denger said.

Mr. Sauder said e-commerce is helping Sauder broaden sales. For example, Walmart.com carries higher-end Sauder furniture that Wal-Mart’s stores will not.

“People who wouldn’t think of going to Walmart for furniture are willing to look at Walmart.com. ... And suddenly you’re getting a new level of customers you didn’t get before,” Mr. Sauder said.

In the future, most furniture will be purchased online, Mr. Sauder said. E-commerce has prompted the company to build a photography studio and add personnel to beef up its digital photography for use on retailer websites.

“In the past, with discount retail customers, we would just shoot one or two angles of the product to be available for the carton graphics and catalog sheets,” Mr. Sauder said. “Now, with e-commerce, we probably take over a dozen shots of each item, including a 360-degree video shot, which are then loaded on the e-commerce sites.”

Contact Jon Chavez at: jchavez@theblade.com or 419-724-6128.

First Published May 21, 2017, 4:00 a.m.