IKEA Operations Management Action Plan
Introduction
The Swedish furnishing retailer firm, IKEA, owns approximately 332 retail stores in over 35 countries. Currently, the company uses its online stores to serve their customers. My literature review and the research on the current IKEA operations will help to create the action plan on the proposed changes and enhancements. Therefore, for the purpose of this module project, as the operation management consultant, I will develop an action plan for the proposed operations in IKEA.
Situational Analysis
According to the previous module project, I have learnt that currently IKEA has given the store workers the responsibility for assisting customers to navigate through the firm’s store and find the products. There is an existence of signage in identifying diverse sections within the firm’s store (Gibson, 2012). The problem with these operations is that workers sometimes are busy and they fail to help some customers effectively. Therefore, many customers may not get assisted and also the poor signage makes it harder for the customers to know how to locate what they are looking for in the stores.
In this case, according to the operational bottlenecks presented in the previous module project presentation, the main plan is to improve the signage and improve customers’ accessibility to the products they are looking for in the stores. I proposed that the IKEA to develop an App for every worker and supply them with iPad that will provide information about the products in the store so that they can be able to guide the customers through the way they can locate the products they need. For instance, when the customer asks for the bookshelf, the worker can easily locate the product using the iPad and tell the customer where they can find the product or deliver it to the customer. Therefore, IKEA operation plan will need to focus mainly on the stores.
Operation Plan Objectives
In this operational plan, there will be two objectives. The first objective is that the firm should develop an App for the employees by August 2016. The App should be accessible to every employee and they should be able to use it to help the customers locate the firm’s products. Following the increased technology advancement in the country, the objective is attainable and it can easily improve customer service satisfaction.
The second objective is to improve the store signage by the end of this year. It is vital to improve signage in the stores to enhance the overall customer’s shopping experience as it is an essential tool for deal alerts and navigation along with expressing the store’s brand. The signs should be visible, illuminated, maintain a consistent feel and look, and show some personality. Therefore, it is important that the company should use technology that will develop a system that will improve signage of products.
Operation Action Plan
To reach all the objectives, the operations department will have to conduct various activities that will help to improve signage and develop an application for the employees (Behnam, 2013; Stevenson, 2014). The following table lists include the activity, procedure, time frame and those who are responsible for the activity as Chase and Jacobs (2007) suggests.
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Activity |
Objective, Procedure, Responsible Person, Time Frame, and Expectation |
|
Activity 1: To grow the IKEA service component in the next 10 months
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Objective: The objective of this activity will be to improve the firm’s signage by the end of 2016. Therefore, the activity will focus on the signage component and making it more visible. It will be done on 3 stores around Toronto. Procedure: The procedure will including developing an operational plan on improving signage system and increasing the efficiency of signage to the firm. Responsible Person: The one who will be responsible for this activity is the store managers. Time Frame: The activity will begin on 30th April up to December 2016. Expectation: The expectation will be improvement of signage system. |
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Activity 2: Additional resources acquisition
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Objective: The objective of this activity is to purchase additional tools and equipment, such as iPads, needed by the stores in regards of the objective. Procedure: The resources will be distributed to all stores in Toronto. The procedure will involving contacting iPad suppliers and gets the quotations and then purchase the iPads for the employees. Responsible Person: The people responsible for this activity will be the store managers. Time Frame: All the iPads should get distributed to every store by the end of June 2016. Expectation: The expectation of this activity is that every store should have more than four iPads by June 2016. |
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Activity 3: Additional Training programs
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Objective: The objective of this activity will be to feed the employees with information about how they will use the iPads to meet the plan objectives of helping the customers to locate their products easily in the stores. Procedure: The activity will be done in all stores. The procedure will include the head store managers conducting lessons that will focus on the employee App in the iPads and how they will use to direct customers in the store. Responsible Person: The head store managers will be responsible in conducting the training programs. Time Frame: The programs will begin in July and end in the beginning of August. Expectation: The expectation is that every employee will be able to locate the products easily in the App and direct the customers effectively. |
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Activity 4: Reorganization of the products in the stores
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Objective: The objective is to reorganize the products according to the information about the products in the App to make them accessible and easy to find by the employees and the customers. Procedure: This will be done by the employees in every store and also they can get assisted by hired handymen. Responsible Person: The store managers and the employees will be in charge of this activity. Time Frame: The activity will take place in 1st May to 30th June 2016. Expectation: The expectation is that every product should be placed in the store according to how it presented in the App. |
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Activity 5: To employ 10 store workers
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Objective: The objective of this activity is to increase employees so that every customer should have someone to help them as they purchase goods from the stores. Procedure: The procedure will include hiring more sales personnel in every store who will be in charge of selling the firm’s products in the stores and ensuring that every customer is served effectively. Responsible Person: The store human resource managers will be in charge of this activity. Time Frame: The activity should take place by the end of May 2016. Expectation: The expectation is that the HRM store managers will be able to recruit qualified sales personnel in the stores. |
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Activity 6: To employ 2 graphic and web designers
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Objective: The objective of this activity is to recruit the graphic and web designers to provide graphic and web design services quality to develop and maintain the store App for the employees. Procedure: The procedure will include recruiting two web and graphic designers who will develop an App for the store and help the employees use it to locate products in the store. Responsible Person: The store’s HRM managers will be responsible for this activity. Time Frame: This activity should be done by 30th May. Expectation: The expectation is that the managers will be able to recruit qualified web and graphic designers who will efficiently develop the employees App and help them understand the application. |
Control and Evaluation
Despite setting the objectives, it is important to control and evaluate the operational programmes or activities (Horn & Faulkner, 2010). The appropriate control type will include sales control and customer’s satisfaction control. Sales analysis and customer satisfaction feedback will indicate that the employees are able to use the information in their iPads to guide the customer in their search for products and delivery of the products (Chopra, 2009). When sales increases it will indicate that more customers are able to locate the products easily as Mahadevan (2010) suggests. Moreover, the customer’s feedback can also be used to indicate the improvement on customer service.
Conclusion
IKEA main issue is based on poor signage and workers failing to assist the workers to locate products in the stores. Therefore the plan objectives include developing an App for the employees and improving the signage. To reach these objectives, the plan will involve activities that include growing IKEA service component, adding resources and training programs, employ store workers and graphic and web designers together with reorganizing store products. Lastly, the plan will then be evaluated using sales and customer satisfaction control.
References
Behnam, M, 2013. Operations and Production Systems with Multiple Objectives. New York:
John Wiley & Sons. Print.
Chopra, R, 2009. ‘IKEA Case Study.’ International Bulletin of Business Administration, Vol. 12
(31), pp: 34-43.
Chase, B & Jacobs, N, 2007. Operations Management: For Competitive Advantage. United
States: McGraw-Hill. Print.
Gibson, J, 2012. ‘The Case of IKEA’s Entry into China.’ Journal of Applied Management and
Entrepreneurship, Vol. 17(2), pp: 1077-1158.
Horn, S & Faulkner, D, 2010. Understanding Global Strategy. London: Cengage Learning
EMEA. Print.
Mahadevan, B, 2010. Operations Management: Theory and Practice. Upper Saddle River:
Pearson Education India. Print.
Stevenson, W, 2014. Operations Management. United States: McGraw-Hill Education. Print.
