Background
IKEA’s in-store food operations needed a connected experience from kiosk ordering through kitchen preparation and customer pickup, with support for different countries and languages.
The engagement began with workshops at Nixdorf’s head office in Paderborn, Germany, alongside the team responsible for the POS application used in IKEA stores around the world. Visionmax’s role was to extend the food-service capabilities around that established environment.
The resulting work brought together catalog and product management, kitchen operations and customer order-status signage for a rollout spanning 10 countries and 12 languages.
The Challenge
Food ordering required combinations, modifiers, configurations and promotional pricing that went beyond the capabilities available in the existing store POS. IKEA needed a practical way to manage those choices and present the right products and images through its kiosk solution.
International operation added another dimension: teams needed to maintain catalog content and translations for different markets while keeping the ordering workflow coherent.
Behind the counter, kitchen staff needed to receive kiosk orders, select the orders they were working on and update their progress. Customers needed clear waitlist and pickup information on digital displays.
These capabilities had to work with IKEA’s existing Diebold Nixdorf kiosk and POS environment, making integration and day-to-day maintainability central to the design.
The Solution
Visionmax delivered connected software for catalog administration, kitchen order management and customer order-status displays.
Visual catalog management: A browser-based tool let teams manage products, pricing, combinations, discounts, food modifiers and ordering configurations. Its drag-and-drop image interface helped users arrange products and configure kiosk menus, with support for multilingual catalog content.
Kitchen operations: The kitchen system gave food-counter operators a working view of incoming kiosk orders. Staff could select orders, work on them and move them through the preparation workflow.
Customer waitlist and pickup displays: Digital signage reflected order progress so customers could see which orders were being prepared and which were ready for collection.
Kiosk and POS integration: Visionmax connected these capabilities to the existing Diebold Nixdorf environment. Diebold Nixdorf provided the customer-facing kiosk ordering application; Visionmax built the catalog management tools, kitchen system and customer order-status displays that supported the wider food-service workflow.
The Results
The software was rolled out across 10 countries and 12 languages, extending IKEA’s established kiosk and POS environment with capabilities tailored to its food operations.
Catalog teams gained a visual way to manage the product choices, combinations, modifiers and pricing configurations needed for kiosk ordering, including localized content.
Kitchen operators could manage kiosk orders through preparation and update the customer waitlist and pickup boards as orders progressed.
The work connected menu configuration, order preparation and customer collection within a common operational workflow, while integrating with the POS platform already used by IKEA. It demonstrates how targeted software and integration can support international food-service operations across markets and languages.