Barilla Case Study

Case Report: Barilla SpA (A)

Module One: Supply Chain Management

Session Five – Supply Chain Inventory Management

Name: Karen Little

Member ID: 10040308

Date Submitted: October 26, 2010

Table Of Contents

1.

Part 1 - Executive Summary

My decision is to recommend that BariZara upgrade their POS system that will include upgrading to a new operating system. Given that 46% of the sales for Zara are generated inside Spain, it makes sense to launch a pilot project within the store in Spain to upgrade the POS systems. Given the proximity of the stores in Spain to the head office and the IT team for Zara, this should assist in the success of the launch as well as dealing with issues that do arise in a more cost effective manner.

After the successful launch of the pilot within Spain, the project can be expanded to other countries within Europe and then to the rest of the world.

In addition, the installation and use of wireless internet in each store should form part of this project to allow for the more efficient transfer of data from PDA’s to the POS system, as well as the ability to more effectively look up in store data, intra-store data, processing returns as well as the transfer of data from each store to head office on a real time basis.

Part 2 - Immediate Issue

There is concern that the POS terminals that are currently in use, are operating using DOS, which has not been supported by Microsoft since 2003. Despite this, Zara’s continued use of the DOS and the internally developed POS application that runs on top of it had proven to be remarkably stable and effective to meet the company’s strategic objectives. Thus the issue facing Zara was: should they upgrade to a modern operating system which could involve enhancing the POS application itself or continue to use their existing IT infrastructure that has worked so well for so long?

Part 3 - Systemic Issues

Zara’s business model operates on a “Fast...