Barilla Spa Case Anaylsis

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Recommendations and Implementation

- At the beginning, Giorgio Maggiali should introduce JITD system’s benefits to senior managers from company strategic perspective. Giorgio should emphasis on the importance sales and marketing department will play in implementing by telling them they are the key in building a strong relationship with distributors. Then Barilla should test if JITD system is feasible for its business operation by using their internal owned 18 warehouses. Barilla should outsource professional forecast consultants to participate for this internal testing in order to provide a better and more realistic result. Giorgio should make a chart based on the result to help internal employees and external distributors to have a better image on the costs the JITD system has saved.

- After the company obtain a positive result from the pilot testing, Barilla should ask their sale representatives with the best communication skills to target supermarket chains as they hold 70% of Barilla’s distributors’ share. Sale reps should show how successful their internal experiment on implementing the system to their distributors. This will increase their confidence in applying the system.

- Sales and marketing team should schedule weekly meeting with distributors to deal with obstacles that have been encountered. Barilla should also hold conferences to teach forecast knowledge to distributors with Barilla’s outsourcing forecast consultants.

- Barilla should spend time and money on manufacturing process to improve the speed. The company should also decrease the variety of product SKUs, only focuses on producing large demand SKUs. Most importantly by benchmarking from outsourcing forecast professionals, Barilla should be able to build its own forecast and data analysis professions within organization.

Monitor and Control

- Tour the distributors’ warehouses and check their inventory to see if they carry appropriate amount of inventory one a week. To reduce inventory holding cost and stock out costs, the amount can be neither too big nor too small. Record the stock level every week and make a chart to see if the JITD system has approved distributors’ inventory level, which in turn reduced their costs.

- Select a sample and conduct a survey to customers who purchase Barilla’s products on regular bases. “Did you have trouble finding the Barilla products you need from supermarkets in past one week?” Such question can be asked in the survey to help the company to monitor and control JITD system.

- Set up meetings regularly to discuss any issues that exist when implementing the new JITD system. Feedback from distributors and customers should be discussed in these meetings to improve the system.