IKEA is one of the most loved Swedish furniture retail companies across the globe that has awed everyone. The brand boasts a highly successful and profitable business model just as corporate giants Facebook, MasterCard, WhatsApp, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, and Uber do. These days the famous home furnishing conglomerate is taking the world by storm with its digitization efforts in which it is heavily focusing on the tech landscape, architecture, and skill-set to achieve its goals. Let’s talk about that.

Exploring IKEA’s Digital Vision

The Dutch multinational conglomerate with digital at its core loves to make our lives at home better. It wants its customers to interact with the company across different channels seamlessly. If we talk about digital transformation—they have embedded it in their DNA with digital touchpoints for customers, digital solutions for employees, and embraced digital ways of working.To realize its vision, it simplified the technology landscape and architecture through a modular approach and parallel processing. The brand made it easier for its existing and new customers to access IKEA and completely transformed customer touchpoints as they wanted their customers to interact with them conveniently. From opening new stores to investing in existing ones, IKEA was aiming at something big. It wanted to create comfortable and unique experiences for the customers with new store formats by integrating physical with digital. Making stores a part of the customer order fulfillment network helped them quickly deliver oversized furniture items to their customers.IKEA infused digitalization across internal functions like finance, supply chain, and human resources to take the efficiency up a notch. The company maintains a 70-30 ratio—70% of efforts are towards scaling initiatives that have gone successful, and 30% of actions are towards developing new technologies. It aligned its digital goals to how they work and are structured from technological and organizational perspectives.The furniture brand believes that every initiative is interconnected to one another. It is important to simplify the technology perspective to have Agile releases as it affects the front-end customer experience. How IKEA works with its employees is at the center of every transformation. It has ensured cross-functional empowerment and focused on accountability for business outcomes.

❛IKEA takes customer experiences to the next level with emerging technologies.❜

The brand uses modern technology to capitalize on excellent opportunities that are present in the home furnishing area. It uses 3D modeling to provide design suggestions to its customers on furnishing a room as per their budget and has a 3D model library that has 33,000+ models and different libraries for materials, textures, and props.Technologies like these help the brand deliver exceptional digital experiences to its customers. IKEA leverages innovation from inside and outside— internal talent and external partners. It plans to consolidate different apps to enable seamless browsing through the catalog, schedule store visits, and virtually decorate from an application. The wide range of smart products catalog takes it one step closer to the dream of becoming digital. Likewise, the company is actively tapping the potential of AI and data intelligence technologies to serve the customers better through product recommendation algorithms, immersive experiences, and more.IKEA believes in having an iterative process when it comes to scaling digital initiatives. It continuously tests, develops, learns, collects feedback from customers, and analyzes data. With a learning attitude, the company scales what works for them and learns from what didn’t work for them.The furnishing mogul has a defined vision of becoming digital. Likewise, it focuses on entrepreneurship and believes that people and culture play a pivotal role in transformation. Intending to align the entire organization with the digital strategy, IKEA empowers its employees to think outside the box and try new things.

Zymr’s Digital Transformation Services

Cultivating a digital-centric mindset is indispensable as we sail through the final phase of the pandemic that highlighted the desperate need for digitalization to organizations globally and championed services like cloud migration, cloud security, and cloud adoption. Zymr believes that, for any organization, pacing up with transformation mustn’t be an afterthought in this day and age. We’ve reimagined our focus on digital transformation services to seize market opportunities. Our team looks forward to becoming your bridge to the digital world!