Business Intelligence in Suppliers’ Management aimed at improving purchasing decision making: A Barilla G. e R. Fratelli S.p.A. case study

The main objective of this work is to present the Case Study conducted between the walls of the offices of Barilla G. e R. Fratelli S.p.A. in Parma, Italy. The core of this Case will present the evolution of the reporting system dedicated to the Purchasing Family of the Company. The project is called Data to Value and will be better detailed in the text of the Thesis. The final objective of this work is to show how this evolution has taken place in a big company like Barilla, moreover it will assess the first results of the implementation of the new technology. Indeed, we are assisting at a real transition and revolution of the systems that the employees of Barilla will use, switching from the Static and offline reality of Microsoft Excel to the dynamic, real time world of Microsoft Power BI. By the way, what this Thesis will say is not that the old system was useful and needed to be replaced. On the contrary what I will point out in the next chapters is that the real problem that we faced is to integrate the old system into the new one. Among the organization there was the strong requirement to have what has been provided till now (in terms of reports and Key Performance Indicators), also in the new system. So our strongest effort was directed towards granting the same data quality and consistency that was obtained with the manual offline work on Excel. This required months of consistency analyses and fine-tuning both with the technical team and the business consultants. This type of work was done using the classical business instruments (SAP, Excel etc.) and the new dashboards implemented in Microsoft Power BI. Besides practical work and on-site research, also theoretical knowledge was employed to develop parts of this thesis. Especially when we refer to the strategic meaning of Key Performance Indicators and Procurement in the New millennium. In this field using literature was particularly useful. Instead, business insights, Company’s information, details on the projects and technical knowledge on that was exclusively drawn from internal material of property of Barilla G. e R. Fratelli S.p.A.. The work will contain a brief history of the company, that one of the biggest realities in Italy and in the World. Then we will switch to the business description assessing it with a quick SWOT Analysis. To define better what will be involved in the transformation there will be also a description on how the Purchasing function works in the company, followed by the outline of the classical reporting system that is implemented in Procurement. Then we have the project and the focus of the whole thesis. This will be outlining the main streams of “Data 2 Value”, pointing out that this project has been started with the purpose of optimizing data usage, maximizing the value of data that was not used before. A description on how the technical structure works is provided in the first subchapters of the project, then we have the two main streams with a result assessment that will involve in particular the second stream dedicated to the “Supplier Spending”. The conclusions will show what are the feelings and feedbacks of the first users of this work, pointing out strength and weaknesses of this system giving a good start point to develop improvements in the future. By the way, the first impressions were quite positive giving lot of trust for the further developments of this project, that will end up in 2023