From forest to household favourite
Since joining the range 50 years ago, IVAR has become synonymous with IKEA – embodying our Democratic Design principles and key values. But what goes into making your favourite storage system? Let’s step into the forest and through the factory – getting to know the wood, people and robots that bring IVAR into the world.
If you’ve ever been in need of more storage in your home, it’s likely you’ve come across the IVAR system. In fact, you may have a unit or two in your home right now! First appearing on store floors in 1968 (and under a different name), the IVAR storage system has grown over the years to include all sorts of versatile configurations and add-ons. While its use of solid pine and modular design have remained virtually unchanged over half a century, a lot of innovation has been going on behind the scenes.
Before each piece of an IVAR storage unit makes its way into your home, it begins its life as a pine tree. But not just any pine tree! Like all the wood at IKEA, the pine used to construct each product in the IVAR system is FSC-certified and from a forest we either own or sourced from a forest we know to be responsibly managed.
“We have strict requirements and special control systems – both for the sourcing of wood at IKEA and for the forests owned by IKEA companies,” says Eliza Pawlik-Rykaczewska, Raw Material Manager for Africa and Europe. “When it comes to how we ensure that we use the wood responsibly, we use wood that is either FSC certified or recycled, which is confirmed by third-party audits and internal verification. We are proud that around 98% of the wood we use is FSC certified or recycled.”
Of course, to achieve these numbers, all sorts of checks and balances must be implemented throughout the process. In order to work with IKEA, every company and business in our supply chain must agree to our supplier code of conduct, ensuring – among other things – the traceability of each piece of wood that makes it onto the factory floor.
Knowing the origin of the wood is a requirement of all wood supplied to IKEA. That means that our suppliers must be able to track the origin of all the wood they supply.
Cost-consciousness is one of the IKEA key values and originates from a time in Sweden when living conditions were far harsher and people had to make do with what they had. While things have changed, our values remain true. We still believe that everyone deserves to live in a beautiful home and that pushes our business to find innovative ways to use raw materials as efficiently as possible.
“We are constantly designing products where we make more from less,” says Eliza. “We consume a lot of wood, so we are ambitiously working to increase the amount of recycled wood in our products, always considering the future consumption of wood for IKEA.” While the IVAR shelving system is constructed from virgin pine, wood scraps from the process are used to make other materials such as fibreboard and particleboard. Nothing goes to waste!
This approach extends beyond the wood we use, and the ‘making more from less’ attitude touches each part of the production process. To learn more, let’s leave the forest and make our way onto the factory floor of Hedlunda Industri in northern Sweden. It’s time to meet some robots!
It’s on this factory floor at Hedlunda that design, engineering, production and packaging come together to bring the IVAR system into the world. Mladen Grkovic is a product engineer responsible for IVAR production. With a sharp eye for detail and a passion for wood, Mladen is well-positioned to problem-solve for both suppliers and products. “Everyone has their role to play, and engineers are the soft middle ground between the business and suppliers. We provide valuable insights into the suppliers – including their work processes, reliability, and consistency. We also have deep knowledge of the wood supply itself.”
While IVAR may seem like a fairly simple product to the consumer eye, its length and small cross-section make it a challenging product to produce. To assure success, two preconditions must be met: high quality raw materials and a precise production process. Hedlunda is in the ideal position to produce IVAR because of the high quality of FSC-certified pine located in northern Sweden and state-of-the-art automation on the factory floor. “Automation is a game changer for production," says Mladen. "It dramatically reduces costs, allows for the seamless shift in production to match order sizes, and maintains a high level of quality in production. Also, having the raw material so close to the factory reduces transportation costs."
“One of the preconditions of automation is that the inspection points for quality be fully automated, too,” says Mladen. “The raw material that comes into the factory is automatically inspected and its yield measured. This means that we can statistically choose the best wood suppliers.”
Once the wood has been inspected and the low quality parts have been cut away, each remaining piece of wood is reconstituted into long pieces. These pieces then make their way through a moulder where they are profiled and split into IVAR posts. From here, the posts are quality controlled once more before all of the product’s necessary holes are drilled and milled. The sensors in the drilling machine ensure the holes are placed perfectly for seamless assembly. This part of the process takes just 5 seconds. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it!
The next part of the process is almost as quick. Once drilled, the posts are sent to the robot packing station where, along with the connectors and fittings, they are automatically packed and wrapped in paper by six perfectly synchronised robots, every ninth second!
“With automation, both price and quality are simultaneously optimised,” says Mladen. “The systematic approach to production assures you that everything works the same all the time.” When a problem does occur, all that is required is to fix that specific problem, and production continues once more.
At IKEA, we are always looking for new and better ways forward. The automation at Hedlunda is part of that, but another important shift has been the impactful introduction of knock-down side units. Previously, the IVAR cabinet side units were packaged as solid pieces, with the cross sections already in place. Today, customers can build the side units at home themselves.
This seemingly small shift in the way IVAR side units are packaged means that many more IVAR cabinets can fit on a single pallet, reducing the number of trucks needed for IVAR transportation by 600 annually.
We know that whatever we are doing today can be done better tomorrow. So what solutions lie ahead? You’ll just have to wait and see what happens next for IVAR and all things IKEA!
Multifunctional, iconic, and made from solid, responsibly sourced pine. What's not to love? Now you know how it's made, how could you not want a little more IVAR in your life?
