How anticipation became the driving force for transformation in a leading food industry company
In this article, we share an exciting success story of Imperia with Noel Alimentaria, the first company to trust our solution. The planning team at Noel Alimentaria shares their challenges in demand, production, and purchasing management, as well as their experience with Imperia since implementing Supply Chain Planning.
Discover how we helped Noel Alimentaria anticipate market demand and significantly improve their operational efficiency.
Introduction to Noel Alimentaria
Noel Alimentaria, founded in 1940, stands out as a leading company in the meat sector in Spain. With a presence in 60 countries and a strategic focus on Europe, especially in England as its main export market, and currently aiming to expand into the United States, the company has achieved a prominent position in the food industry. Around 50% of its sales by volume are made in Spain, consolidating its reputation as a reliable and valued local brand.
What Was the Need?
Noel Alimentaria faced a challenge: its ERP system lacked adequate modules for efficiently managing demand, production, and purchasing, or in some cases, these modules were not developed at all. Thus, the need to centralize data and have a solution to consolidate information, parameterize it, and plan with future projections became evident. They sought training to understand this data and learn how to work with it effectively.
Noel chose Imperia for its functional fit, the balance between price, implementation time, and competitiveness, and its ability to integrate with the existing ERP.
«It provides the functionalities you need, not just what’s available in the market—a solution that adapts and charges you only for what you need.”
Pau Font (SCM Manager)
It was an internal commitment to work and invest in the planning department and externally to trust Imperia’s software.
The tool, Supply Chain Planning, replaced a manual process based on spreadsheets, enabling more informed and reliable decision-making.
Current Situation Between Noel Alimentaria and Imperia
«Anticipating what might come is essential for any company, not just meat companies like Noel. This demand forecasting is the cornerstone that then allows better production, optimized purchasing, and inventory adjustments.»
Jordi Parra (Técnico de Producción de Noel Alimentaria)
The main challenge in a food company is product obsolescence; an error in stocks is a direct financial loss and a negative environmental impact.
Noel Alimentaria faces the need to anticipate its customers’ demands, who prefer to place frequent weekly orders and thereby reduce the error rate with regular deliveries. To address this challenge, Noel adopts a distribution model involving advanced inventory maintenance due to standard long lead times. This has led the organization to establish several international warehouses for agile and precise distribution to its customers.
In this context, Imperia provides them with the ability to anticipate demand accurately. Facilitating stock calculations and projections, allowing for precise adjustments in production and purchases to meet market needs. This proactive approach has helped Noel Alimentaria meet the expected service level of their end customers, with a 5% improvement in service level, positively impacting both commercial and interdepartmental levels.
«Having an idea of what we’re going to sell and what’s going to happen is having an aggregated forecast of everything.»
Next Steps
With the support of Imperia, the Noel team is ready to continue improving delivery times, product shelf life, and inventory levels. At Imperia, we strive to provide our clients with the confidence needed to tackle any challenge the industry presents.
The active collaboration between Noel Alimentaria and Imperia is based on mutual cooperation sessions, where perspectives are exchanged, and new functionalities are developed in our tool. These interactions not only enable the continuous customization of our SCP solution to meet the specific needs of Noel Alimentaria but also give us the opportunity to learn from their experiences, helping us stay at the forefront of innovation in the supply chain field.
