Digital Labels
Ikea

"Seriously guys, why haven't we done this before?" 
Peter Kamprad - Chairman of the Board

The case

Capgemini Sweden asked us to participate in an IKEA project in Ghent Belgium. IKEA Ghent is coping with the highest hourly rates for co-workers in Belgium. To reduce costs these hours needed to be brought down. In order to comply to the question we started a service design process in where the following principles were important: thorough research in order to get a human centered solution, a holistic view to the case and working in co-creation with the client. The proof of concepts in Ghent will act as test environment with as goal global implementation.

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Research

The solution needs to be user centered, so thorough research is a must. After 3 days of intense field research, shadowing employees and interviewing them, we’ve mapped all internal proccesses and bottlenecks creating a holistic view on the matter.

Ideation

In order to gain traction within a company working together with the client is key. So we facilitated design thinking sessions in co-creation with IKEA generating awesome out of the box ideas. We picked out two of those ideas and converted them into a proof of concept wit a strong business case.

Hey

From print to digital

Price tags

When it comes down to price tags, we found out that the as-is situation was quite labor-intensive, since every label in store had to be printed out manually. A great deal of hours could be gained if the printed price tags could be replaced by digital labels. A price change could be applied not only for one store but to the whole country as well, resulting in a massive reduction of hours.

Location tracking

RFID Tags
Returning goods to their exact location is a time consuming process. Confusing especially when there are multiple locations with item X. So we came up with the idea to tag items with RFID fitted stickers.

Double advantage
As our primary goal was to reduce employee hours, the concept can be used for consumer purposes as well. For example, the integration of RFID tags in combination with the IKEA app can navigate visitors to the right spot in the store.