L'historique d'IKEA ( en anglais)

II. A company which constitutes a benchmark in the sector

IKEA History

In 1943, IKEA was born in Sweden, at that time, the Swedish furniture market was organized on cartel to prevent outside competition.

Customers had a high salary and the market was strictly local

Nothing could provide internationalization and positioning Ikea to customers with low salary.

Today, the firm is the first world distributor of furniture and accessories for the house

Inter – system IKEA is owner and franchisor of the concept, his operation is simply based in a franchise system in all the world.

Ikea its 127 000 people in staff in 41 country and a turnover of 23,1billion of euros.

IKEA Value chain

Supply chain of IKEA

The management of the supply chain spans :

 All movement and stock of raw materials

 The work in progress

 The stock

 The finished product and the transport

The transport begin at the origin to point of consumption

The structure of Ikea is based for optimize the processes of supplying; Sweden is the general district where all of the basic furniture is designed.

Actually there is 57 supplier of raw material, and all of them is working with ECIS (Ikea System). ECIS allow to IKEA:

 Show the level of stock

 The previsions

 the transparency of supply chain

 anticipate demand

The retailer keep a big part of responsibilities, for that they integrate a complex system of communication base of informatics.

Communication is very important because the production center is responsible of distribution of finished product.

The high personal of IKEA is concentrate to develop the fabrication of simple, good, durable and affordable products. A team specialized (IPT) watch that all requirements are respected.

All of divisions of IKEA work independently but they are always connecting and watching by the Business support center which keeps the decisions of introduction of new technologies and the logistics. The business support center take logistics decisions for all the store in the world.

The politics of IKEA is shorten time. It’s for that the product is sometime transport directly from the production to the customer, without going to the store. This technique allow to IKEA to save time and money.

It is collaboration between the suppliers, the intermediaries, the services suppliers and the customer thanks the different transport sources.

The keys words are the demand and forecast planning.

IKEA

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