The Amadori Group, a leading Italian company in the agri-food sector, chose Board to launch a transformation of its Demand Planning processes. Board’s solution enabled the company to centralize and optimize demand forecasting activities, reducing the number of planners involved, automating most processes, and introducing advanced algorithms capable of managing complex variables. In addition, Board facilitated more effective communication between demand planners and sales contacts, improving forecast accuracy.
Thanks to Board’s technological support, the Amadori Group has made its supply chain more agile and resilient, ensuring better responsiveness to market dynamics and laying a solid foundation for sustainable growth.
We significantly reduced the number of people involved in Demand Planning. These individuals now serve as the link between the Supply Chain and the Commercial function.
Elisa Stefanazzi
Founded in 1969 in San Vittore di Cesena, the Amadori Group is one of the largest players in Italy’s agri-food industry. Specializing in poultry production, in recent years the company has been expanding its offerings to include plant-based protein products, with the goal of addressing new challenges related to food supply, sustainability, and resource circularity. This shift toward broader responsibility stems from the recognition of a rapidly changing world that demands constant evolution from companies.
One of Amadori’s key strengths is its direct control of the entire value chain—from feed mills and hatcheries to farms, food production, and distribution. However, such a long and complex supply chain inevitably poses significant challenges, particularly in supply chain management. In fact, in addition to producing Amadori-branded products, the Group also manufactures for distributors, retailers, and the foodservice industry. It must manage approximately 3,000 SKUs across five sales channels with highly diverse needs and dynamics, elevated levels of product customization, and extremely short lead times between order and delivery.
To address these complexities, the company designed a new Target Operating Model to redefine its strategic objectives, identifying product freshness, customer service level, and internal process efficiency as critical success factors. These goals can only be achieved by optimizing production planning, improving responsiveness to customer demand, and—most importantly—enhancing sales forecast quality.
Amadori tackled these challenges through a transformation program centered around demand forecasting processes, which in turn feed into production planning, allocation, and order promising activities. The starting point for this transformation was selecting software capable of meeting the company’s new requirements.
The previous demand planning solution connected individual sales contacts directly to customers but lacked a unified, company-wide view.
This fragmented process, with a high number of operators not specialized in forecasting, resulted in forecasts based on partial and subjective information.
To overcome these limitations, the Group turned to Board to develop a new model that redefined the Demand Planning process—shifting the focus from customers to products and assigning demand forecasting for the entire company and all sales channels not to individual contacts (around 70, who can now focus on more commercial activities), but to a dedicated team of just nine demand planners.
The introduction of a more advanced algorithm—capable of handling seasonality and variables such as trends and holidays—allowed the company to generate a more reliable baseline, contributing to a significant improvement in forecast accuracy and a reduction in BIAS and MAPE errors.
Another key advantage of Board is its integration with Amadori’s ERP system, which enables instant updates to the supply chain based on any changes made by the Demand Planning team. Furthermore, Board enhances communication between sales contacts and demand planners, for example, by relaying unexpected market requests in real time.
In conclusion, by centralizing and optimizing its Demand Planning processes, Board has contributed to improving both short- and mid-term planning at Amadori.
