Company overview
Tikamoon was founded in 2008 in the French town of Lille. The company has grown rapidly and is among Europe's leading design and furniture brands, covering everything from product design to logistics and customer service.
Tikamoon’s motto is 'Passion and excellence.' Digital tools and using data across the company are cornerstones in its efforts to achieve the best possible results.
The digital platforms and approach help ensure sustainable production, design, and a streamlined supply chain to prepare for future needs within responsible sourcing.
Tikamoon’s furniture is designed to last and guarantees its products for five years. It is in the process of extending that guarantee to ten years. Quality is an essential part of this mission to make more sustainable products and expand the product lifetime.
Doubling the warranty period
When things work optimally, your tools become almost invisible. This observation was core to Tikamoon’s evolving production processes and business operations strategy.
The company’s strategic goals also included building out its position as a market leader for sustainable, high-quality furniture to its clients and within the furniture industry.
Tikamoon also wanted to double its product warranty period from an impressive five to ten years while maintaining revenue momentum. Its revenue grew almost 45% year-on-year between 2020 and 2021.
“With production and quality needs growing, we wanted to streamline and evolve quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC). At the time, quality inspectors did inspections on-site, went back to the office and wrote up a report with attached excel spreadsheets and photos that were mailed to the head office for review and final approval. With Qarma, that is all changed.”
- Mathieu Voisin Head of Quality, Division of Purchasing & Product Quality
As a result of the revenue increase, tracking quality and generating insights needed to evolve quality metrics was challenging – it simply did not have the speed and visibility required to produce at a high pace and make the right decisions as early as possible.
Creating a red line through every step
To reach its QA and QC goals, Tikamoon examined and evolved every step of its processes. Core focus areas included:
- Transparency: QC should provide insights and information
- Communication: QC should ease real-time conversations on quality matters
- Quality: QC should increase quality and warranty times
- Innovation: QC should be an active part of evolving business processes
A trial of several solutions led to Qarma becoming the preferred vendor and collaborator.
“Qarma’s simple, straightforward interface, QC speed and the powerful data generated through its solutions make it a no-brainer.”
Qarma also plays a central role in the product conversation between different parts of the production.
For example, Tikkamoon's product design includes a master document, often more than 30 pages long, that describes and defines all product parts. Through Qarma's intuitive checklist function, the master document is easily translated into a guide for inspectors that showswhat metrics to check and how to measure them - and informs their efforts to improve product quality.
Increased transparency and meeting KPIs
The upgrades to QA and QC with Qarma have led to several advantages for Tikamoon.
QA and QC processes have been streamlined and upgraded to handle larger numbers of inspections. Simultaneously, the company has deployed consistent structures governing quality inspections and report filing. This is sometimes overlooked when considering data gathering and analysis. Without such formats, data structuring becomes harder and analysis risks becoming incomplete.
Furthermore, consistent data has been central to Tikamoon integrating QC data in its ERP systems through Qarma’s intuitive API.
“Our setup makes QC a real-time milestone in the production process, and increased transparency boosts our ability to find efficiencies in product life cycles that can be both complex and global.”
The result for Tikamoon is that the company is better equipped to meet its definition of quality: meeting the customer's expectations.
The company also works with and trains its suppliers to perform self-QC in jurisdictions where it needs to increase production volume to hire a QC.
Breakout: What does the future of quality look like?
Tikamoon is looking to be at the forefront of quality assurance and quality control. To remain a market leader, it actively works with evolving business processes and considers the future of manufacturing and quality.
Some of the lessons learned include:
- Focus on digital and data-centric approaches: Data and digital solutions are vital, but they are only as good as the people and processes in place around them.
- Think globally: Quality metrics are important from the design process over production and QC team to customer experience. Find ways of sharing data, metrics, and insights throughout your production setup.
- Less can be more: Not all parts of your setup need access to the same data, tools, or insights. Tailoring information levels to different groups is a core part of the future of quality.
- Dare to set the rules: Existing dogma about what quality is – and what it can do for your company – should not limit you. Instead, make bold decisions and have lofty goals.
- Complexity is your enemy: Information detail does not equal complexity in the data-gathering processes.
- Invest in quality: Tikamoon is opening a facility in France with lab testing products and potential product parts. Along with investments in innovative tools like Qarma, this supports our quality journey and ability to meet future quality demands.
