Visualization of High Load Transactional Data

Abstract: IKEA is a Swedish company that has been the largest retailer of furniture for the past fifteen years. Selling orders worth EUR 44.6 billion in 2022, IKEA has to meet great logistic needs in order to maintain a functioning business. In the current IKEA landscape teams that consume order data have to listen to multiple sources and compare the data they receive to get specific information from an order. All this logic is built by each team themselves. This means that the same process is done by multiple teams at IKEA, demanding valuable time and effort that could be spent on development. IKEA is therefore developing ’Customer Order 360’ (CO360) - a software product meant to re-organize IKEA’s order flow and gather all order events regarding customer orders in one place. CO360 has not yet been adopted by all teams within IKEA. Therefore they need a visualization tool to help them demonstrate what CO360 is and convince future consumers why they should switch to the CO360 solution. A user centered design process rooted in thorough research was conducted. Various processes, methods, and tools within the design science were utilized such as prototypes, brainstorming, data analysis and usability testing. Several iterations of the Double Diamond phases were undertaken, including many interviews and discussion with the team, and analysis throughout the entire process. The most significant aspects of CO360 to convey to its future consumers are the shielding from complexity and tailored so-called "business events" it provides them. These factors were included and prioritized in the prototypes developed which were followed up with evaluations from the team. A final implementation was reached that displayed the data flow before, during and after being processed by CO360. The visualization also showed these processes that CO360 utilizes to create the events it exports. An evaluation was carried out with participants from both the CO360 team, but also other teams within IKEA. It was concluded that the visualization showed good understanding of the product, and could be used to assist in a presentation of CO360.