Najib abdi
DSCI 434
3/24/2011
Barilla SpA
Case Study

1. Diagnose the underlying causes of the difficulties that the JITD program was created to solve. What are the benefits and drawbacks of this program?
One of the underlying causes of the difficulties that the JITD program was created to solve was the effects of inconsistent demand that came from Barilla’s distributors. The extreme demand variation strained Barillas manufacturing and logistics, and made very hard for Barilla to meet that demand. For example, as noted on the case “the specific sequence of pasta production necessitated by the tight heat and humidity specifications in the tunnel kiln made it difficult to quickly produce a particular pasta that had been sold out due …show more content…

As one marketing representative quoted “we wouldn’t be able to run trade promotions with JITD, how can we get the trade to push Barilla product to retailers if we don’t offer some sort of incentive?” These conflicts are mostly caused by fear of losing jobs. Since these are legitimate concerns and a very possible outcome if JITD is implemented, from my opinion there are only two options either retrain all the employees that would be affected in a different positions or get rid of the JITD program all together and if it was up to me I would scrub the whole program all together.
3. As one of Barilla’s customers, what would your response to JIDT be?
This would depend on whether I am a big retail store or a distributer. As a Barilla’s Distributor, my response to JIDT would be, why would I share my sales data to a supplier who also supplies the same products to my competitors? In addition, what makes Barilla’s management think that they can do superior job by making a better demand forecast then I do. I would think that Barillas is only looking after their interest by trying to reduce their inventory cost and as result dumping their product on me. On the other hand if am a big retailer the JITD program would help me reduce my overhead that comes from keeping a weeks of supply from Barilla in my store, and if there are any time gaps between when product is out and when new comes in I can use the shelf to