Quality Deviation Specialist

Our mission in Supply Chain Operations (SCO) is to supply IKEA products to our customers in a simple, affordable, sustainable, and excellent way. Whenever our products don’t reach our customers in an excellent way, we, Quality in Supply Chain Operations, take the lead to investigate deviations, connect relevant stakeholders, and mediate the discussions to decide what to do with the inventory, manage financial implications, and enable to convey learnings into improvements.

Job Description About the assignment

it’s all about satisfied customers in our Quality Direction!

Our objective is to enhance speed and implement more effective measures for addressing quality deviations, ultimately achieving greater success in our stores through improved customer-perceived quality. To meet our customers' high expectations, we have established a global Quality Deviation Management (QDM).

We, as QDM, organize and manage the quality deviation process together with our key stakeholders while always keeping customer expectations in mind. We achieve this through analyzing the potential quality deviations that our stores and distribution centers report to us. As franchisor, we must secure that the franchisees get reimbursed and find a solution for the defected goods. Moreover, we collaborate with our stakeholders to ensure that we learn from our mistakes and therefore, improve the quality of our goods and our processes.

QDM has two mandates: (1) Product Quality, where we, together with our stakeholders, ensure our customers ultimately purchase a product that has been well designed and produced, and meets our IKEA product requirements. (2) Supply Quality, where we secure that our food and home furnishing products are well-protected and handled with care and that they reach our customers in good conditions.

In Your Role As QDS, You Will

• Analyse the reported deviations and order discrepancies, define whether they are valid deviations or not and secure collection of proper documentation for root cause analysis.
• Identify relevant stakeholders connected to a deviation, initiate dialogue and make available all relevant information for a decision to be made on who was the causing party and what action should be taken with affected goods (in transit and/or stock on hand).
• Observe patterns and trends in deviations and initiate investigations with concerned stakeholders whenever a recurring problem occurs.
• Calculate the costs related to a deviation and prepare documents for the financial settlement between the causing party and the owner of the goods.
• Actively manage the open cases and secure the communication flow among the stakeholders until a solution can be provided and the case can be closed.
• Ensure utilization of applicable tools and working methods for each specific case and secure alignment within the team.
• Contribute to the Action Plan activities to secure goals set in line with Quality Direction and Supply Strategy are met.
• Be an ambassador for quality by actively sharing feedback and lessons learned from handled cases and by collaborating with team members to improve ways of working.

Qualifications About You:

You Bring Knowledge Of

• IKEA Supply Chain stakeholders and how they impact quality
• SCO Quality Direction
• ways of working with deviations, root cause analysis and claims
• claim and conflict management
• reporting and data visualization tools
• customer needs and expectations regarding quality performance

As a Person You Are

• energized by a dynamic environment and navigating through unknown situations
• finding the best way to solve a problem and looking for long term solutions
• Setting own or team goals and investing energy and drive in reaching them
• interacting and collaborating with others. Building trust and partnership to reach common goals
• continuously learning and sharing knowledge
• understanding the sense of urgency and a "Quality-First" mindset