FourKites: Enabling Visibility Across Barilla’s Supply Chain
Barilla has remained a family business since its founding in 1877 and has established itself as the world leader in pasta production. People around the world consume more than 2 million tons of Barilla products on a daily basis.
The company has an intricate logistics operation that includes 30 production sites, 15 of which are in Italy and 15 across the globe. Every week the company moves more than 2,000 loads from Italy to over 120 countries via road and ocean transport.
Barilla has worked with FourKites since 2021 to ensure it has real-time supply chain insights about where its goods are in the entire lifecycle of a shipment. This ensures that the company gets its products to customers in the most effective way and with the best service.
FourKites gives Barilla visibility into 80% of its road and ocean shipments transported by a fleet of 35 carriers and three ocean freight forwarders.
A data-driven supply chain
FourKites feeds shipment location data into Barilla’s control tower, giving the company a comprehensive view of their end-to-end supply chain. Through patented AI, FourKites generates highly accurate insights that help Barilla identify exceptions early, so they can take action and prioritise work based on impact.
“FourKites’ data isn’t about false alarms, it’s about real alarms,” says Davide Busato, Logistic Competence Center Innovation Project Manager at Barilla.
By directly incorporating hundreds of real-time data points into Barilla’s control tower, Fourkites has created a seamless self-service experience that provides supply chain intelligence for the Barilla team.
“FourKites breaks down silos between systems and teams," adds Davide.
"We can share data to generate insights, identify shocks before they happen and, most importantly, manage exceptions across our supply chain. As a result, we have streamlined operations, reduced costs and improved the customer experience.”
Increased efficiency
According to Davide, FourKites’ platform reduced the time Barilla spent manually interacting with partners, such as 3PLs and suppliers, “FourKites’ platform easily sends automatic ETAs with delays directly to all our partners and their predicted arrival times are spot on. This gives all of us the right insights at the right place and the right time to make the best decisions.”
Ocean expansion
Ocean shipments are an important part of Barilla’s logistics operation and equal about 10% of its market. Barilla was already using FourKites for over-the-road (OTR) visibility and wanted to have insight into all its shipments regardless of the mode.
“Freight forwarders oversee Barilla’s ocean shipments but it was costly and time-consuming because we had to manually check with carriers on the location of shipments,” says Davide.
“Adding FourKites’ ocean visibility to our setup was an obvious choice, and it’s paid off handsomely. Now we don’t need to spend time hunting for answers and instead can focus on more important tasks like acting on the FourKites data to improve customer satisfaction.”
Customer satisfaction
FourKites ensures Barilla’s customers have highly accurate predicted arrival times as ETAs are updated in transit and incorrect planned transit times are highlighted to ensure activities start, and stay, on schedule.
“Before we started using FourKites’ platform we could only react to an issue when it was too late,” says Davide. “Now we react before an issue escalates into a major problem, which saves time while reducing transportation costs and fines. This in turn improves our relationships with carriers and customers.”
Supply chain visibility now a requirement
Supply chain visibility has become a critical part of Barilla’s business and they require all partners to use it.
“When we started with FourKites, visibility was a nice-to-have. Now it’s a must-have. For instance, visibility is a requirement whenever we have a tender with a new carrier,” confirms Davide.
Their successful partnership continues
The partnership with FourKites is successful not just because of the technology but because of the way of working.
“The entire FourKites team is proactive, collaborative and agile,” says Davide.
“Our goals with FourKites in 2024 are to track 90% of our shipments, reduce penalties with carriers by 5% and decrease inefficient communication with partners by 10-15%. Thanks to FourKites’ ability to send automatic ETAs with delay updates among other features, we’re well on our way to meeting these metrics.”
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