Italpizza

Italpizza was founded in 1991 in Castello di Serravalle, a small town over the “colli”, the hills surrounding Bologna, where in a few years has become the Italian leading company specialized in the production of high quality frozen pizzas. Market rising success leads Italpizza to move all production activities in one premises in San Donnino (MO),in a 5.000 MQ new plant.

Italpizza undertook some important technological investments aimed at increasing productive capacity, maintaining unaltered the traditional characteristics of Italian pizza: rising of the dough for at least 24 hours, all pizzas stretched by hand and cooked in a wood burning oven.

The wide range of finished products to manage (Italpizza branded and private label) as well as the highly dynamic marked demand led Italpizza to choose a flexible, innovative and user-friendly planning tool, capable to appropriately model and plan sales promotion events, typical of large-scale retail trade.

As regards the finite capacity scheduling process, the peculiar and strict production constraints to comply with as well as the respect of specific sequencing criteria to optimise production have been carefully analysed and the final achieving the expected results in implementing Compass¹⁰.

To effectively support Italpizza’s planning requirements accordingly to its peculiar production process and constraints, the scheduling model implementd has made use of Compass¹⁰ standard Rythm Wheel Production approach.

This function, accordingly to its original Lean Production concepts, is designed to generate a strict production sequence, based on product characteristics, to create a repetitive production cycle in a fix prodction interval (in this case, one week). The system is capable to define which items and quantity to produce, taking into consideration delivery priority and days in inventory optimisation.

The thorough initial analysis of Italpizza’s planning model has led to implement a combined MTO and MTS approach, taking into account the forecasting cycle and the influence of sales promotions.

The new Advanced Planning & Scheduling system:

• supports the planner to elaborate the Master Production Schedule (MPS) for all finished products (frozen and fresh ones), considering the overall demand and planned sales promotions;
• generates the finite capacity schedule for each resource, which, under machines and lines capacity constraint:
  • defines the optimal sequence for every line, leading to the lowest possible set-up times, stabilising production and improving the planning of cleaning activities
  • levels out the inventory turnover ratio for MTS items
  • takes into account «shelf life» restrictions for finished products, limiting the maximum advance horizon for production
  • fulfills the production constraints concerning tools and materials availability
• provides effective BI tools to analyse key performance indicators and critical resources impact on service level

“The implementation of Compass¹⁰ – says Marco Quartieri, Italpizza’s Planning Manager – has led us to gain full visibility of our planning horizon (12 months).  As regards the short term, Compass¹⁰ in-memory algorythms allow to take in and react quickly to daily modifications, as well as to create different scenario simulations. Furthermore, Compass¹⁰ powerful analysis tools support us to evaluate how demand affects

resources, even on the mid- to long-term horizon, increasing transparency along the entire supply chain.”

• Extended planning and scheduling horizon
• Enhanced flexibility to react to market fluctuations
• Management of alternative scenarios
• Set-up reduction and dynamic sequencing optimisation