Barilla

9-694-046

REV: MARCH 25, 2008

JANICE H. HAMMOND

Barilla SpA (A)

Giorgio Maggiali was becoming increasingly frustrated. As director of logistics for the world’s

largest pasta producer, Barilla SpA1, he was acutely aware of the growing burden that demand

fluctuations imposed on the company’s manufacturing and distribution system. Since his

appointment in 1988 as director of logistics, he had been trying to make headway on an innovative

idea proposed by Brando Vitali, who had served as Barilla’s director of logistics before Maggiali. The

idea, which Vitali called Just-in-Time Distribution (JITD), was modeled after the popular “Just-InTime” manufacturing concept. In essence, Vitali proposed that, rather than follow the traditional

practice of delivering product to Barilla’s distributors on the basis of whatever orders those

distributors placed with the company, Barilla’s own logistics organization would instead specify the

“appropriate” delivery quantities—those that would more effectively meet end-consumer’s needs yet

would also more evenly distribute the workload on Barilla’s manufacturing and logistics systems.

For two years Maggiali, a strong supporter of Vitali’s proposal, had tried to implement the idea,

but now, in the spring of 1990, little progress had been made. It seemed that Barilla’s customers were

simply unwilling to give up their authority to place orders as they pleased; some were even reluctant

to provide the detailed sales data upon which Barilla could make delivery decisions and improve its

demand forecasts. Perhaps more disconcerting was the internal resistance from Barilla’s own sales

and marketing organizations, which saw the concept as infeasible or dangerous, or both. Perhaps it

was time to discard the idea as simply unworkable. If not, how might he increase the chances that

the idea would be accepted?

Company Background

Barilla was founded in 1875 when Pietro Barilla opened a small shop in Parma, Italy on via...