Automation Integration Leader

What you'll need to have

Do you want to be part of one of the world's largest and most challenging omnichannel and automation transformation initiatives?

IKEA is the world's leading home furnishing retailer, and we are transforming how we meet our customer's needs by providing them with greater convenience at the lowest possible costs enabled by high levels of automation. We are looking for dynamic and knowledgeable warehouse automation experts who can help enable our transformation by bringing high levels of automation to the fulfillment of the most challenging range of products and services in retail today.

As a person, you have a desire to understand the IKEA business and customer needs and influence the improvement of the business with a focus on customer satisfaction. You enjoy applying a tactical and operational approach to analyzing business opportunities from a customer perspective and get inspired by challenging situations. You possess a strong ability to identify needs and drive change within the organisation on group and market-level acting in a multi-cultural and matrix environment.

To be successful in this position, you bring the following competencies:

• University degree in engineering, automation, logistics, or economics, or a proven track record working with the hardware side of automation solutions.

• Solid understanding of handling material flow solutions within warehousing, logistics, and/or a retail environment.

• Comprehensive understanding of how service fulfillment leads to excellent customer fulfillment and good knowledge of relevant IT systems/solutions/tools associated with this area.

• Experience within project- and vendor management and know-how to successfully lead projects on a country/market/national level.

• Understand key performance measurements used to plan, follow up, and steer the business with a customer-centric approach.

• Good understanding of customer needs, demands, and expectations in the market.

At IKEA, you’re welcome no matter where you come from, what you believe, and what you look like. We don’t even care how you have furnished your home. We’re interested in you simply because you’re you. Our different views, backgrounds, and personalities make us better understand our customers, give us more fun at work, and spark more and better ideas. Perhaps your unique take on something could lead to a great idea that creates a better everyday life for the many people.

Your responsibilities

Within a store with fulfillment capabilities, you will develop automated solutions supporting customer fulfillment in our IKEA stores. You will act as the subject matter expert and, together with the other deployment team members, create and implement a solution portfolio best suited for the individual store situation. You will also work closely with the service and store fulfillment operation leaders to transform our stores into more efficient and customer-centric fulfillment units. Moreover, you will contribute with both knowledge and expertise to multichannel development, bridging the knowledge from the store with fulfillment capabilities initiative to a country-specific store project. Your role should analyze the pre-conditions met in a specific store environment and match them with the prerequisites required to use a special bundle of automated solutions.

More specifically, you will:

• Analyze, design & dimension automation solutions to be implemented and run in several automation projects.

• Enable higher throughput of flows from existing stores and find scalable and space-optimized solutions while retaining a good customer experience in the store.

• Take responsibility for the development, testing, and support during the implementation of new technical/automated solutions in the project stores.

• Coordinate and collaborate activities with other IKEA teams and suppliers while supporting the design of the systems to ensure the designed solution works seamlessly within the store processes.

• Establish and collect proper data to help with the need analysis and support the solution design process.

• Contribute to business cases by giving indications during initial feasibility studies.

• Secure that solutions provided are meeting an optimized end-to-end customer fulfillment process.

• Work with suppliers to develop systems and subsystems.

• Act as the technical spokesperson for automation and innovation suppliers and ensure their engineers understand IKEA's business needs.

This role is based in Malmö or Amsterdam.

Our team within IKEA

The Store with Fulfilment Capabilities Initiative is a key initiative of IKEA's strategic

transition projects, becoming the leading multichannel home furnishing retailer. The assignment is to deploy a portfolio of solutions to empower existing stores with fulfillment capabilities, making them a key element in the multichannel network while keeping their commerciality in meeting our customers. This portfolio covers the end-to-end process of order fulfillment in a store, from Goods Receiving to storage, picking, order preparation, and order storage up to outbound & handover from stores. They need to be adapted to the countries’ needs.

The deployment initiative is asked to:

• Implement new store designs in multiple markets across the world

• Run several automation projects enabling higher throughput of flows from existing stores

• Match technologies and working methods with return on investment evaluations of countries and find the sweet spot to balance both

• Secure that required digital enhancements are delivered and implemented in respective units

We’re the team behind the scenes that makes IKEA products available to many people. As a diverse mix of co-workers, we use our supply process expertise to balance range and space capacity with forecasting and ordering to provide customers with high availability while minimizing costs. If you wonder who’s responsible for finding effective and efficient ways of picking up the products for our customers, that’s us. We’re passionate about working together to improve the customer experience at IKEA!

Questions and support? Let's connect!

We will be reviewing applications continuously. You are welcome to apply, but please do so before September, 7th.

PLEASE NOTE

Please respect that, due to GDPR, we cannot review applications received outside of our recruitment program.