About a year ago I moved to a new appartment. I bought the appartment I’m in now and unfortunately, newly built appartments usually don’t come with couches, dinner tables and beds. Since all the (rented) appartments I had in the past where furnished mostly, I didn’t have that much stuff of my own yet. I bought some new stuff, but also used a bed of a friend of mine for over a year, while he was abroad. This weekend he returned, and needed his old bed so I had to buy a new one. I actually didn’t expect him to want his bed returned, so I didn’t use the past year to search for a new one.

So where do you go, when you need a new bed right away?? Well, here, there’s only one place to go really, and that’s the IKEA. I don’t like the IKEA that much, because if you put too many IKEA stuff in your house, it’s going to look IKEA’ish for sure, and I’m not sure if that’s what I want :). Anyway, I had to get a new bed fast, so IKEA it was. After arriving at the store in Utrecht, I quickly found a good bed in the showroom, had a guy explain a bit about the matrasses and chose one that seemed comfortable. Off we went to the counter to order the bed and the matrass. The guy at the counter quickly came to the conclusion, he had to dissappoint us, because the bed was out of stock.

I remember a new IKEA had just opened in Amersfoort, which is quite close to Utrecht, so I ask the guy if the bed was in stock there. Well, as a matter of fact it was! They had 3 left. I still had to do some other stuff first, so I also asked him: ‘Can you reserver one of those for me?’. He said he couldn’t, simply because they didn’t want a whole bunch of dangling reservation for stuff that people might not pick up. ‘But don’t worry’, he said, ‘the bed is not going to go out of stock, they only sell about 1.2 of those a week in Amersfoort‘.

No way, I thought! This guy, an IKEA salesman (with all due respect), not knowing anything of IT or inventory management at all, is able to tell me (without being amazed about it), how many beds of a certain type they’re selling on a average weekly basis in a certain store?? And he just takes it for granted???

I asked the guy if I could have a look at his screen and there it was, somewhere in between other details about the Vinstra (link in Dutch) bed; an entry saying the average sales per week for this bed was 1.2.

‘But that’s not a miracle, is it’, I hear you saying. Well, it’s not, but if you think about it carefully, how many times does it happen you go to a store and you find its IT infrastructure to be everything you hoped for, having no questions left when you leave the store? I think this is amazing and an example of IT done well. A quick search didn’t get me references to what ERP system IKEA uses or who implemented this, but it sure is a good implementation, because no matter what system it is, it sure gave me a good experience while visiting IKEA in Utrecht.

p.s. This by the way only partially made my day, because the other stuff you have to go through when visiting an IKEA on a Saturday afternoon is just horrifying! When I entered the IKEA in Amersfoort, I immediately realized I would have to do things real quick here, otherwise I would definitely end up with an IKEA overdose. So I quickly rushed through the store, ordered my bed, did a little waiting for the bed to be picked up from their internal warehous and drove home. The bedroom now has a closet and a bed from IKEA. That’s the limit as far as I’m concerned. There’s some Japanese antique stuff in there as well, which nicely balances with the IKEA pieces ;-). If I would have had time, I would have bought the Pallucco bed in the picture above.