Ikea

IKEA is an international company with 70,000 employees, active in 42 countries. The assortment, which is identical to in all IKEA countries, includes about 10,000 products. The basic idea in the creation of the assortment is to offer products with a nice design a good functionality for prices, which almost anyone can afford. Last year, IKEA department stores were visited by 286 million of people all over the world. The IKEA catalogue was published with the printing of 118 million copies in 45 editions (in 23 language mutations).

Why did IKEA decide for a change?

The Slovak version of the site of IKEA did not comply, in terms of firm standards used, with the required prerequisites. The design did not comply with the prescribed requirements, which meant that the Slovak site version had differed greatly from sites of the company in other countries. The site failed to comply with criteria for the presentations of a similar orientation even from the contentual point of view. The reason for that was the absence of any WCMS (Web Content Management System), which would allow to update the web site content from time to time. Each, even though a minor, update of the site lasted an unreasonably long period and had to be done by an external firm.

Lomtec for IKEA

The orderer of the IKEA project was the advertising agency, JVCS (Juraj Vaculík Creative Studio). This means that the communication with regard to the new Web was at the level of project managers of JVCS and Lomtec. "The first contact with JVCS was made in September 2001", Matej Marcin, Project Manager of Lomtec, responsible for the IKEA project, says. "We became familiar with basic requirements for the new IKEA site, as well as with the requirement to keep the deadline, related to the launch of a November catalogue."

Lomtec has extensive experience with the implementation of similar projects, and has fully used it also in the IKEA project. The graphical layout of the future site was clearly defined already by functional patterns. "Our Swedish site was to serve an example for us (www.ikea.se)", Matej Marcin says. "Therefore, we acceded to the creation of a HTML code, exactly according to the pattern." The web structure had to correspond to the pattern too. The use of the Lomtec ActiveWeb content management system, developed by us, seemed the most suitable solution.

In the event of IKEA.sk we have also carefully observed the used project methodology, verified by previous projects, which starts by an analysis of client's requirements, continues through a design of specific solutions, implementation, testing, and launch of the project, and ends by the evaluation and support.

Result

The work on the IKEA.sk project started in the first half of October 2001. In November 2001, the site was already fully functional. Its visitors could become familiar with a new product catalogue of IKEA directly on the Web, or could order through the new Web. The attendance rate of the site, which shows, in a certain way, its quality, has rapidly grown.

The possibility of a simple and quick administration of the site through the ActiveWeb content management system has become its great advantage. In addition, since then, several users could actively work with the web site content. The setting of the scope of powers of particular users is another one of the benefits, being also provided by the ActiveWeb solution. Lomtec ActiveWeb has not only enabled the existence of a product catalogue but it, inter alia, supports mass imports of products. This means that extensive changes in the site content (launch of the new product catalogue) could have been time-harmonized with the ongoing advertising campaigns, which has significantly contributed to a decrease in costs.

Conclusion

The orderer of the project, the JVCS advertising company, was satisfied with the result so much that it ordered the production also of the Czech site mutation with Lomtec.com. "Since ActiveWeb is at the same time a system, supporting the creation of other language versions", it was no problem to satisfy the JVCS requirement, Matej Marcin, Project Manager of Lomtec.com, responsible for the IKEA project, says.