Low-Code: a tool for employee commitment

IKEA France, a major player in the retail sector, sees new technologies as a means of (re)committing employees. Developing high value-added services, better understanding customer expectations, imagining differentiating experiences... Within the company, each technology must serve as a guide or as a support for the business lines. "The employee empowerment strategy revolves around two axes: increasing efficiency - refocusing people on higher value-added tasks - and developing expertise - enabling employees to better understand customer expectations in order to serve them better," Christophe Cadic, Head of Digital at IKEA France, explains. So, when the company realized the potential of Low-Code, it was only natural that it decided to implement such an approach for the benefit of its teams. Christophe Cadic, Head of Digital, Jérôme Desoubeaux, Country Products Leader, and Benoit Vienne, Power Community Manager at IKEA France, tell us how technology has enabled them to rethink the employee experience. 

When technology drives business 

Since the pandemic, digital technology is everywhere. It cannot be overlooked, especially in a sector as competitive and demanding as retail. "In the wake of the health crisis, we understood the urgent need to rethink our working methods and processes to adapt to the new world. We had to act quickly to make sure we didn't miss this opportunity," Jérôme Desoubeaux confides, "while remaining true to our innovation strategy, featuring the customer experience and the employee experience at its core," Christophe Cadic adds. 

And when they needed to find the means to reinvent themselves in no time at all, the teams at IKEA France have chosen to strengthen the technological capabilities of their employees, with tools used by professionals for their professions. "The idea was to be able to respond to a need that we didn't assume was real, but that a Group employee presented to us as being real," Jérôme Desoubeaux explains, adding that business experts are in the best position to identify the needs inherent to their activity. The company wanted to be able to answer the expressed needs quickly and simply: IKEA France's Low-Code approach was put into action.

By deploying the Microsoft Power Apps environment, Low-Code has given a new impetus to the Group: the expression of a business need and its implementation become one and the same step. "Power Platform is used to prototype a response to a need in an efficient, factual way," Jérôme Desoubeaux explains, "and each application designed from the Power Platform becomes a product in its own right.

Winning over teams is the key to successful digital transformation

With an annual return on investment of 26 million euros already directly linked to the development of Power Apps applications, this technological approach is undeniably beneficial to the company. However, it needs to be understood and adopted by all employees. Indeed, for IKEA France, it is essential to give meaning to the transformation through innovation: "We have to explain why this transformation is being undertaken before explaining how it is being carried out, and do so by implementing a genuine change management policy," Christophe Cadic insists. And to ensure that the process remains relevant, there's a lot of framing and steering work to be done at the same time. "We chose to group application development requests at central level, to avoid the pitfall of having the same solution developed by several group entities," Jérôme Desoubeaux points out. 

The Power Community led by Benoit Vienne is setting the wheels in motion for the adoption of Low-Code and the centralization of requests. Beyond disseminating best practices, the role of Benoit Vienne and the other members of the Power Community is first and foremost to democratize and encourage the adoption of the technology at all levels of the company. "We're here to prove that it's possible to do lots of things with digital tools, without it being complex, and without being a development or even IT genius," he enthuses.

Applications that embody IKEA France's ambition to transform the employee and customer experience

The professional interview, a French specialty which is compulsory for every employee every two years, has also been the subject of the development of a Power App to notify each manager of upcoming milestones, support them in conducting the interviews, and guarantee each employee this privileged moment of exchange on the anniversary of their hiring. The return on investment, in terms of both cost and time, was achieved even before the end of the roll-out, with HR teams saving almost 7 hours a month, and saving €13 million on penalties for not carrying out professional interviews.  

On the operations side, the management of internal merchandise transactions has also been automated for greater responsiveness to employee needs. It is now possible to make and track a stock adjustment request from a dedicated platform in a secure manner, and to identify the right associated approving officer thanks to an individual digital identity system based on Azure technology. The Sales and Logistics Department appreciated a precious increase in performance and time savings: since its launch, 136 transactions per day per unit have been completed, saving over 2,700 hours per month.

Customer satisfaction is no less important. In order to guarantee an optimal customer experience, despite unforeseen events, a new service is set up by the teams in just a few days. From a single interface, employees can access all the information they need to manage logistics and goods issues. Managing available parking spaces and undelivered orders, welcoming customers who come to pick up their "click & collect" orders... Customer flows are streamlined and staff schedules are adapted accordingly. This saves almost 35 hours of processing time per day for each of the 36 equipped units. 

Creating value through digital for professional fulfillment

Christophe Cadic observes. But that's all in the past, as Low-Code now brings together business and technology concerns: "We're now in a position to hybridize profiles that were originally functional". Autonomy, creativity, elimination of low value-added tasks, time savings... Everything is done to enable everyone to concentrate on their core business, while eliminating any irritants. Low-Code is now seen by IKEA France employees as a tool for their performance, and above all as a tool for their development and personal fulfillment. 

"Low-Code generates considerable value. In some cases, a solution's return on investment is achieved before deployment is complete," Jérôme Desoubeaux notes. This success extends beyond France's borders: more than 2,400 employees have already tried their hand at Low-Code, self-help groups are emerging spontaneously, and "some in-store employees are now able to create applications on their own", Benoit Vienne points out. The Power Community, for its part, brings together over 4,000 members addressing the needs of the teams where IKEA operates. In all, almost 1,500 applications have been created worldwide. France, one of the leading countries in the adoption of the technology within the Group, has 1,490 users and 430 applications were developed to address the needs of its 34 stores and 4 national warehouses.

Low-Code is a flagship innovation at IKEA France, and is as much a response to specific local issues that no Group solution can address, as it is to a global strategy driven by the organization. "We are deploying a whole arsenal of technologies with a tailor-made approach, with the aim of increasing our policy of employee commitment and customer satisfaction tenfold", Christophe Cadic explains. Motivated by the success of Low-Code, the company continues to build on its momentum. It is launching its first pilot projects integrating Artificial Intelligence into its Low-Code applications, such as text recognition. To take employee engagement a step further, it is also banking on data. "We are working more and more with data, which is becoming a structuring element of our business and, here again, a means of facilitating our employees' work". IKEA France is also planning to use RPA - Robotic Process Automation - to simplify business processes in its contact centers, and is investing heavily in mobile technologies to facilitate mobile working and collaboration between teams. Innovation, yes, but for the people !