IKEA Partnership Going From Strength to Strength

Since the partnership started in 1997, Consafe Logistics has been involved in the setting up of many of the new Distribution Centres that IKEA has opened worldwide. There are more in the pipeline for 2005.

It's been six decades since IKEA began trading from a small farming village in Sweden. Today, IKEA is a global company with more then 200 stores in 29 countries around the world. Together with Consafe Logistics IKEA has implemented the Astro warehouse management system in 15 of their Distribution Centres (DC) and Customer Distribution Centres (CDC).

Both parties are pleased about the way this partnership has progressed since the initial project of implementing a WMS project at IKEA DC in Lyon, France. This successful implementation was copied in many other areas. More implementation projects followed quickly in the next five years. IKEA opened DCs in Sweden (3), Russia, Austria, Italy, Spain, UK (2), Canada, US (3).

Consafe Logistics long experience and reputation as high quality system integrators with skills in combining manual and automated warehouse management cost effectively is one reason that IKEA has chosen to partner with Consafe.

Since 13 January this year the IKEA DC in New Jersey USA is running Astro WMS at full capacity with 175 warehouse employees. Ed Morris, Operations Manager at the site comments, "We have seen that we are already back to picking 4,500 customer order lines per day and able to ship 34 trailers to the stores by the end of week one. I am confident that we will be exceeding our previous daily expectations in the very near future.Through the partnership we have built with the Consafe team, I am sure that both sides will take things away from this project and use them in the future. I really believe that this cutover was a success for both IKEA and Consafe."

IKEA is one of Consafe Logistics long-term global customers and one of the reasons that the cooperation has been successful is that both companies share the same values and view logistics in the same way. The relationship is built on trust and honesty which forms the basis of all the successful projects so far. IKEA knows Consafe will put their best interests first.

Consafe supplies well-proven and competitive solutions that suit IKEAS needs and Astro WMS is a system that fits in well with IKEAs ethos of how their Supply Chain shall be built and should function. Astro WMS is an excellent platform for the company in their rapid expansion and supports them in their work to build a stable system platform.

Continuous Operation Projects

IKEA UK is expanding its current Doncaster DC warehouse with 3 modules: IKEA pallet, EUR pallet and a high-rack system with fully automatic double-aisle cranes from LTW - Doppelmayr. There will be space for 70.000 pallets in the 2 conventional modules and 100.000 pallets in the high-rack system. The warehouse capacity will be 270.000 pallets and therefore the largest IKEA Distribution Centre in the world.

Several new DCs and extenstion projects are planned for 2005 - Torsvik Sweden, Shanghai China, Wels Austria, Paris France, Piacenza Italy, Valls Spain and Vancouver Canada.