A mobile safety handbook for IKEA's field workforce

IKEA's field employees — sourcing leads, quality auditors, logistics supervisors — often travel through remote and insecure terrain to visit supplier factories. Paper safety handbooks were outdated the day they printed, impossible to update consistently across regions, and easy to leave behind. The safety team needed a single source of truth that every field employee carried in their pocket — that worked offline, updated automatically the next time a device had connectivity, and spoke the languages employees actually use on the ground. The catch: this was a proof-of-concept budget. We had three months and no licence to touch the existing global IT landscape.

We treated the constraint as the brief. Rather than fight for enterprise integration, we designed for a narrow, high-impact first version — content delivery, offline caching, multi-language support, and a lightweight admin panel for the safety team. Two early calls shaped the architecture. First, offline-first: employees in insecure terrain often go days without connectivity. Second, content freshness: the safety team had to be able to push an update without going through any IT ticket queue. Everything else we left out of V1.

A cross-platform mobile app with a web-based admin console. Field employees download content packs once, then the app works entirely offline — procedures, protocols, emergency contacts, decision trees. When a device comes online, it pulls new content in the background without interrupting the employee. The admin console lets the safety team publish updates, translate content into additional languages, and see roughly how many employees are running which version across regions. Built with a lightweight backend so it could be handed over to IKEA's internal team without ceremony.

The proof-of-concept shipped on time to IKEA's South Asia safety function. Field employees had the handbook on their own devices, offline, updated whenever the safety team published. The engagement validated the mobile-first approach for a function that had been paper-dependent for decades.