Akila is thrilled to announce that we are deploying the Akila Platform in IKEA’s retail stores across Japan. Akila will be rolled out at 10 retail sites and 1 distribution center for a total of over 400,000 square meters digitalized. The Akila platform will centralize all data relating to the operations and energy consumption of each site.
Data centralization is an important step in understanding how and why organizations consume energy and generate carbon emissions. With these baselines set, decision-makers can begin to chart a course towards decarbonization. By deploying our solution at IKEA Japan, we hope to assist them in achieving their sustainability goals and significantly reduce their environmental footprint as they move towards a more sustainable future.
Previously, IKEA Japan’s properties operated on one of six different building management systems (BMS), each with varying levels of EMS and building automation (BA) systems. The disconnected and siloed energy management systems (EMS) resulted in conflicting data sources which became a pain point when measuring portfolio-wide performance and conducting cross-site analyses within Japan and at the HQ level.
With Akila’s deployment, we developed and created digital twins of the key retail locations, assisting IKEA Japan in establishing baselines for energy use and successfully digitalizing and integrating previously isolated operations across 11 properties into a single platform. This platform standardizes and unifies energy performance analysis by adopting the BACnet protocol for energy data. As a result, data collection is expedited, enabling comprehensive portfolio-wide analysis and seamless integration of energy data from existing systems.
As part of IKEA’s sustainability strategy to tackle climate change, IKEA Japan is committed to becoming climate-positive by 2030 and aims to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest. Additionally, IKEA Japan plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by half across its value chain by 2030, compared to its 2016 baseline.
To strengthen their digitalization and sustainability efforts, IKEA has followed up successful deployments in China, Akila has helped reduce tens of thousands of tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) and save millions of dollars in energy spending. With the Akila Platform, IKEA Japan can digitalize its energy systems, benchmark performance across stores, and streamline its ESG reporting.
