Ikea Analyzes Survey

Operations management is concerned with managing the resources that directly produce the Organization’s service or product. The resources usually consist of people, materials, technology and information but go wider than this. These resources are bought together by a series of processes so that they are utilized to deliver the primary service or product of the organization. Thus, operations management is concerned with managing inputs (resources) through transformation processes to deliver outputs (service or products) . According to this concept, I use this transformation model to identify my understanding about operations management of IKEA.[pic 1][pic 2][pic 3][pic 4][pic 5][pic 6][pic 7][pic 8][pic 9][pic 10]

  Obviously, IKEA’ operations management goes through these three parts.

1. Inputs

    During the first stage, IKEA analyzes surveys and bases on its company concepts and goals to determine its inputs.

• Customers: determining the consumption level. In the early, IKEA made the decision to stand with the majority of the consumers.  IKEA bases on this market localization to do subsequent decisions.

• Materials: IKEA designed its own purchasing strategy to realize the goal. The main elements of the purchasing strategy are price, quality, environment, best buy, competitive bidding, cost savings by creating optimal conditions. All this elements interacted with each other to determine the suppliers to cooperate. For example, first, IKEA adopts global-purchasing strategy to achieve the goal of the lowest of the total cost. IKEA will analyze the suppliers’ price, location, local policies, environment factors to make up the end decisions. We all know that IKEA has 17 purchasing areas, headquarters base on each area manager’s reports, weigh the various of situations and determine in which area to purchase which material. Second, IKEA will evaluate the suppliers’ service level, quality every year to guarantee its own products. Also, every year, IKEA will communicate with suppliers to make sure the price development, the new techniques and the improvement of the production efficiency to formulate measures.

    I introduce the two main aspects of the inputs in brief, I think operations management mainly focuses on the transformation process.

  2．Transformation process

     (1). Design activities

    In my opinion, this process mainly consists of three parts: design the goal products, marketing strategies and services. As to design goal products, based on the company’s concept to design the low price, simple, elegant, environmental, high quality products which can be flat-packed efficiently.