How IKEA brought last-mile furniture delivery back under its own control with Mover

When co-workers couldn't see past the warehouse door

Before Mover, IKEA's home delivery process was fully planned and executed by External Service Partners. That meant IKEA's own co-workers had no access or tools to manage or support anything that happened between the unit and the customer's front door. When something went wrong, a missed window, a wrong item, a delivery that never showed, IKEA often heard about it from an angry customer before anyone internally had seen it coming. The quality of the delivery experience was, structurally, out of IKEA's hands..

One system, two very different customers

Part of what made this hard to fix with a generic solution is that IKEA's customers don't want the same thing from a delivery. Some want the cheapest option available and are happy to be flexible on timing. Others expect, and are willing to pay for, an exact delivery window and their furniture placed in a specific room in their home. A platform built around one of those expectations fails the other, and furniture, unlike a parcel, makes that failure expensive: a missed appointment for a wardrobe or a sofa isn't a redelivery, it's a second full crew, a second full trip.

Mapping before automating

Rather than deploying a standard platform and asking IKEA to adapt around it, Mover started by mapping IKEA's order flow and every customer touchpoint across the last-mile journey. That mapping became the foundation the rest of the system was built on: route planning across all vehicle types, loading preparation at the warehouse, live tracking across both external carriers and IKEA's own vehicles, proactive customer communication, and a dedicated driver delivery app.

Down to the minute, floor by floor

The result is a level of operational detail IKEA didn't have visibility into before.

"For IKEA, we make a real difference, because they now get transparency and control over deliveries all the way from the warehouse, through terminals, to the customer's living room," says Martin C. Hansen, co-founder and CEO of Mover.

"IKEA can see exactly how many minutes it takes to get a two-person sofa to the curb in Ringsted versus up to the fourth floor in Østerbro, and how to most efficiently transport the customer's used sofa back for return" Martin says.

Mapping before automating

"Almost overnight, the solution improved our transparency and delivery precision, and let us reduce delivery costs," Baumgartner says.

That same visibility now reaches IKEA's customer service centers directly, so co-workers can resolve delivery issues with real information in hand instead of calling around to find out what happened, catching wrong or duplicate deliveries before they compound into repeat trips.

Toward a fossil-free delivery promise

IKEA named Mover's platform as one piece of its ambition for fossil-free home deliveries across its network by 2025.

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