Creating a Winning Recipe for a Hyperefficient Supply Chain: A Case Study on Barilla
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)
- Functional Applications - Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
Applicable Industries
- Consumer Goods
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Maintenance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
About The Customer
Barilla is the largest pasta producer in the world, with over 300 different food products made in more than 90 factories and distributed across over 100 countries. The company has a diverse ecosystem of production sites, raw material vendors, distribution centers, and thousands of retailers serving markets from Asia to Europe and into the Americas. Barilla has long been at the forefront of technology innovations in an effort to deliver the best food products to the masses. However, as their distribution expanded to support the growing demand for their products worldwide, it became clear they needed to modernize their data to allow analytics at scale.
The Challenge
Barilla, the world's largest pasta producer, faced significant challenges due to unpredictable crop yields and rising raw material costs caused by climate change. These disruptions led to product shortages and quality issues, necessitating a more sustainable and resilient supply chain strategy. However, Barilla's legacy on-premises data warehouse was unable to scale their operations effectively, creating silos that hindered their ability to navigate these external threats. The company's supply chain and logistics needed to maintain high-quality standards while maximizing revenue in a low-margin business. As Barilla's distribution expanded to meet growing global demand, it became clear that they needed to modernize their data to enable analytics at scale. With over 1TB of data ingested daily, data analysts struggled to integrate and analyze the necessary data, leading to delays and inefficiencies. Additionally, Barilla's large European footprint required processing sensitive consumer data for GDPR compliance, necessitating a robust data governance plan.
The Solution
Barilla adopted Databricks Lakehouse as their data strategy, upgrading their monolithic, mainframe-based infrastructure to Azure Databricks and Power BI for departmental reporting and dashboarding. This transition propelled Barilla's data-driven transition, with 90% of their business now running on Databricks Lakehouse. Barilla uses Databricks for their entire ML practice, delivering intelligence that guides manufacturing, improves operations, and drives their environmental sustainability efforts. With manufacturing cost deployment models, staff can extract and allocate industrial costs and quantify plant losses. They can also better predict machine failure and schedule maintenance windows proactively. To streamline supply chain management, Barilla implemented a traceability system using Databricks. By analyzing supplier performance through BI dashboards, they can assess supplier risk. Barilla's marketing teams use Databricks Lakehouse to understand customer behavior and preferences, identify new markets, and segment customers to drive more revenue opportunities.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
.png)
Case Study
Improving Vending Machine Profitability with the Internet of Things (IoT)
The vending industry is undergoing a sea change, taking advantage of new technologies to go beyond just delivering snacks to creating a new retail location. Intelligent vending machines can be found in many public locations as well as company facilities, selling different types of goods and services, including even computer accessories, gold bars, tickets, and office supplies. With increasing sophistication, they may also provide time- and location-based data pertaining to sales, inventory, and customer preferences. But at the end of the day, vending machine operators know greater profitability is driven by higher sales and lower operating costs.
Case Study
Improving Production Line Efficiency with Ethernet Micro RTU Controller
Moxa was asked to provide a connectivity solution for one of the world's leading cosmetics companies. This multinational corporation, with retail presence in 130 countries, 23 global braches, and over 66,000 employees, sought to improve the efficiency of their production process by migrating from manual monitoring to an automatic productivity monitoring system. The production line was being monitored by ABB Real-TPI, a factory information system that offers data collection and analysis to improve plant efficiency. Due to software limitations, the customer needed an OPC server and a corresponding I/O solution to collect data from additional sensor devices for the Real-TPI system. The goal is to enable the factory information system to more thoroughly collect data from every corner of the production line. This will improve its ability to measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and translate into increased production efficiencies. System Requirements • Instant status updates while still consuming minimal bandwidth to relieve strain on limited factory networks • Interoperable with ABB Real-TPI • Small form factor appropriate for deployment where space is scarce • Remote software management and configuration to simplify operations
Case Study
How Sirqul’s IoT Platform is Crafting Carrefour’s New In-Store Experiences
Carrefour Taiwan’s goal is to be completely digital by end of 2018. Out-dated manual methods for analysis and assumptions limited Carrefour’s ability to change the customer experience and were void of real-time decision-making capabilities. Rather than relying solely on sales data, assumptions, and disparate systems, Carrefour Taiwan’s CEO led an initiative to find a connected IoT solution that could give the team the ability to make real-time changes and more informed decisions. Prior to implementing, Carrefour struggled to address their conversion rates and did not have the proper insights into the customer decision-making process nor how to make an immediate impact without losing customer confidence.
Case Study
Digital Retail Security Solutions
Sennco wanted to help its retail customers increase sales and profits by developing an innovative alarm system as opposed to conventional connected alarms that are permanently tethered to display products. These traditional security systems were cumbersome and intrusive to the customer shopping experience. Additionally, they provided no useful data or analytics.
