From the Inside Out
Warehouse to housewares, the IKEA experience is unique
Savannah’s IKEA distribution center looks like the famous stores it serves. Visitors enter through a chic lobby furnished with IKEA products, much like the way the company showcases its wares in vignettes of furnished apartments created in its retail outlets. Inside the distribution center, flat, brown cardboard boxes of merchandise are stacked in storage racks, just like the storage area in IKEA stores, where customers pick up the boxes containing the furniture they picked out on the display floor, before taking it home to assemble themselves.
One area of the distribution center that is nothing like the store at all is the high-tech silo at the center of its operations that is precisely the opposite of do-it-yourself. Here, machinery does the manual labor, whisking pallets of products from conveyor belts into their storage bays as much as 90 feet above, saving both time and precious floor space.
But even this highly automated system depends on the skilled IKEA team to properly prep the thousands of pallets that come through the distribution system each day.
Thanks to their Quick Start training, they’re steadily increasing the silo’s efficiency.
“The silo is the heart of our operation,” says Gary Holler, IKEA operations support manager. “It’s critical, for example, that the products stacked on the pallets be placed exactly right, or they’ll be rejected by the system. At the beginning, we had a 95 percent rejection rate; now we have 35 percent and falling. I attribute that to training and repetition.”
Material success
Another way in which IKEA’s warehouse operations resemble their retail counterparts is that the company is an innovator in both. From the inside out, the IKEA experience is unique. Therefore, the company couldn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to training.
“The first thing people who’ve worked in other distribution centers notice when they come here is our pallets — we use what’s called the IKEA pallet, and it’s 800x2000 mm, which is a size not used anywhere else,” says Holler. “We found our products fit better on these.”
So, Quick Start fittingly took a do-it-yourself attitude towards creating training materials for IKEA, building everything, from job-specific training manuals, to job aids for the warehouse floor, to an all-encompassing safety video, from the ground up for the company.
“Quick Start was incredibly helpful in that during our startup; thanks to them, we could focus on our operations rather
than producing documents,” says Holler. “And the quality of what Quick Start produced was so great that a lot of the people in IKEA were jealous. No one else has anything like Quick Start, and they kept saying ‘What do you mean, it’s free?’”
Distribution Center Manager Ed Morris agrees. “Working with the Quick Start team has been a very enjoyable experience,” he says. “Not only did we meet our goal, I feel the Quick Start team has surpassed it with the positive obstinacy, perseverance and that irrepressible determination Jan Melcher’s team put forth in partnering with IKEA. I thank them for all of their efforts and making this startup project a true success.”
The extra mile
IKEA literally goes the extra mile to make sure the new hires in the distribution center truly understand what their jobs are all about. Recently, the warehouse team took a field trip to the only IKEA store in Georgia, 250 miles away in Atlanta.
“In Savannah, no one’s really had a chance to experience IKEA,” says Holler. “So we recently took our coworkers to the Atlanta store to let them see the furniture and realize that it’s not just about delivering brown boxes — it’s furniture that people will use in their homes for years to come.”
back to top
