The Ikea Poang Chair is one of those pieces of furniture that doesn’t have an extraordinary design yet is interesting enough to stand out. It’s not over the top but not too simple either. It features the ideal combination of comfort and simplicity. Its casual design allows it to adapt to a variety of décor plus the versatility specific to all Ikea products allows you to include it in all sorts of DIY projects and transformations.Make a custom cover for your Poang chair if the original isn’t interesting enough for your décor or if you want to hide all the years or wear and tear. Find some fabric you want, cut the pieces to size and start sewing them together.The slipcover you make for your Poang chair can feature an interesting and eye-catching pattern or color or it can be simple. Usually, it matches other décor elements in the room such as the bedding, the carpet or the pillows.If you also have the matching footstool, then this duo can easily replace a rocking chair, saving you lots of money.
But watch out because that beautiful white shade won’t last forever so you’d better consider making some matching slipcovers.Once you start to take apart the chair, the whole project may seem like a big mistake but, don’t worry, it will start looking better it no time. The chair will look like a completely new piece of furniture once you’re finished with it, especially if the fabric you choose for the cover is radically different from the original.The Poang armchair is ideal for nursery rooms. It’s comfortable and has a beautiful and delicate design. Plus, the fact that you can customize it with adding slipcovers means you can opt for a lovely pastel hue that matches the nursery walls.Include the Poang chair in the living room where it can be an addition to the sofa and ottoman seating. It would look great in a corner, placed at an angle.Can you imagine yourself in front of this stone fireplace, relaxing in this comfortable chair, with your feet up, resting? That’s a great image.
Make the Poang chair the main piece of furniture in your reading corner. Add a comfy cushion and a side table and place the chair in front of a window where there’s plenty of natural light.Or take it to the bedroom where it would fit perfectly with its casual and simple design. In here, it complements the bedroom’s modern and minimalist décor.“For us, good design is the right combination of form, function, quality, sustainability and a low price. We call it ‘democratic design’, because we believe good home furnishing is for everyone. It’s why we’re constantly exploring smarter, thriftier ways to do things.” – IKEA Website With revenue of over 29 billion euros in 2014, 315 stores in 27 countries, 9,500 product types, and 147,000 employees, IKEA Group is one of Sweden’s best-known companies. IKEA designs, manufactures, and supplies quality furniture at low prices to make it accessible to the majority of people. IKEA’s furniture products are designed to be sleek and minimalist, and manufactured to be easy to assemble and maintain.
IKEA is a great example of a company that effectively aligns it business model and operating model. In order to deliver on its customer promise of providing quality furniture at affordable prices, IKEA relies on its value chain to optimize its production and overhead costs, as exemplified below: In order to reach the shop floor, a product must meet four criteria: affordability, sustainability, good design, and functionality. Interestingly, the design-planning of any product starts by first setting a price at which a product will be sold. As part of that, designers have to select which design elements, raw materials, and production techniques to use in order to reduce production costs. Furthermore, the designers often work on the factory floor, directly interacting with the manufacturing team in order to understand the capabilities and constraints of the manufacturing department, thereby streamlining the design process and minimizing the cost of the prototyping phase. In addition to that, IKEA standardizes the production processes by using a limited selection of raw materials across the product ranges and it uses the same base design for different products (example: the chairs from the PELLO series have the same base design as chairs from the POÄNG chairs).
This level of standardization results in lower rates of defect and scrap, therefore less waste and cost. IKEA has over 50,000 SKUs; in order to relieve the challenge of product variability, IKEA relies on extensive forecasting, and usually planning production five years in advance. Similar to Toyota’s Heijunka practice, IKEA relies on long-term planning to evenly balance production volumes across its network of more than 1,000 third-party manufacturers. As we learned in the TOM course, spreading out production demand allows for suppliers to have a uniform cycle time which ultimately leads to lower production costs per unit. Furthermore, with the help of an Advanced Planning and Scheduling software, IKEA allocates production to suppliers based on each supplier’s production capacity and raw material availabilities. After productions, the products are transported to a network of 47 IKEA-owned, highly-automated distribution centers located in 17 countries. In order to optimize on warehousing and transportation requirements, the finished products are tightly packed into flat packages.
This type of packages makes the finished goods easy to transport (leading to decreased transportation costs) and easy to store (leading to decreased warehousing costs). After customers browse the shop floor and select the items to purchase, they head to the store’s warehouse to retrieve the packages themselves. Because the customers are responsible for picking up their packages, IKEA does not have to hire labor that would otherwise assume such a responsibility. This helps drive down IKEA’s labor cost. Consumers play another role in IKEA’s low-cost strategy. Because the customers are responsible for transporting the furniture out of the store and assembling it, IKEA further saves on labor, shipping and overhead costs associated with furniture assembly and delivery. Overall, I think IKEA effectively manages several key elements of its value chain from design-process to its retail stores, and it has access to customer’s demand patterns. With this information flow and control from one end of the supply to the other, IKEA is able to smoothen the bullwhip effect that other firms typically experience.