Demand-Driven Planning Case Study | Satuerca Lifts Capacity 20% And Cuts Inventory 30% With Intuiflow

From spreadsheet firefighting to stable, flow-based execution in a volatile automotive market.

Satuerca manufactures forged and machined components for leading automotive customers. The company has been named Renault’s best supplier in quality forging five times in the last decade and has also been recognized by NTN-SNR.

Behind the awards, planners were wrestling with volatility: inaccurate signals, daily schedule changes, and too much cash trapped in semi-finished stock.

“Our Demand Driven MRP processes have significantly improved flow management. The Intuiflow solution is easy to use.”
— Xabier Tudanca, Production Manager

The Breaking Point: Volatile Demand And Excel-Driven Chaos

Satuerca runs high-speed horizontal forging (≈140–160 parts/min), heat treatment, and machining—big batches, big consequences if priorities shift late.

Before Intuiflow, Stamping and Machining planned independently, creating nervousness and expedites. Planners copied forecasts into Excel, then chased daily changes:

• Inaccurate & volatile demand signals (consignment customers pulled “what they need today,” regardless of prior forecasts).
• Constant plan changes mid-week to react to raw-material delays or last-minute orders.
• High semi-finished WIP that wasn’t the SKU customers actually needed.
• A daily reality of urgent setups, overtime, and expediting.

“Excel is an amazing tool, but only the person who built it truly knows what it’s doing… we were always having the same issue.”
— Xabier Tudanca

A New Way To Plan: Decouple, Filter, And Flow

In 2012, after reading a demand-driven paper that “described exactly what we were living,” Satuerca brought in CMG Consultores to implement DDMRP with Intuiflow.

The project moved fast—May to July—with go-live in September (one of Europe’s first DDMRP implementations), strongly backed by the GM.

What Changed On The Shop Floor

• Strategic decoupling with buffers at three points:

1. Raw material (long steel lead times),
2. Pre-machining (to protect machining from forging variability),
3. Finished goods (to meet pull-based customer consumption).

• Demand filtering: planners ignored unreliable signals and let buffers translate consumption into stable priorities.

• One plan, one priority: purchasing, forging, and machining synchronized to the same visual, exception-driven signals.

• Daily refresh: replacing weekly Excel snapshots with daily, system-driven updates and clear red/yellow/green priorities.

“We changed our mentality: for Forging, the customer is Machining; for Machining, the customer is the end customer. Buffers in the right places changed everything.”
— Xabier Tudanca

The Impact: Smoother Weeks, Fewer Surprises, More Output

Within weeks, the “nervous factory” feeling faded:

• Production capacity up 20% (fewer emergency changeovers; stable sequences).
• Global inventory down 30%, with stock in the right SKUs instead of stranded WIP.
• Massive reduction in plan changes; week-long schedules became normal.
• Expediting minimized; machine time used for the right items.
• Service levels maintained/improved without burning teams out.

On the floor, people noticed the calm: workers even asked if demand had dropped—yet Satuerca was actually shipping more to key customers because flow stabilized and setups shrank.

“Every morning I open the system and see exactly what we must do today and why. Training a new planner took less than a month.”
— Xabier Tudanca

How Intuiflow Made The Difference

• Visual priorities replace spreadsheet complexity; planners work by exception.
• Buffers translate variability into actionable signals, aligning Forging ↔ Machining ↔ Customers.
• Daily data refresh enables fast reaction without blowing up the schedule.
• Capacity increases come from fewer urgent setups and stable sequences—not from brute force.

Results Achieved At Satuerca With Intuiflow

• 20% increase in production capacity
• 30% reduction in global inventory

Future-Proof Your Supply Chain With Intuiflow

Satuerca’s transformation shows how Intuiflow helps manufacturers replace forecast-driven firefighting with stable, demand-driven flow.

Intuiflow connects materials planning, scheduling, and execution in one unified platform. Planners manage by priorities, not noise, with AI-optimized buffers and live dashboards showing exactly where attention is needed.

Intuiflow: One Platform. Four Core Solutions

• Materials Planning: Keep inventory aligned to real demand, avoiding shortages and overstocks.

• Scheduling & Execution: Sequence work by true priorities, not arbitrary due dates.

• Sales & Operations Planning: Link strategic goals to daily realities through shared visibility.

• Demand Planning: Adapt plans dynamically as conditions shift.

Intuiflow Is Smarter By Design

With Autopilot, Intuiflow’s AI engine continuously tunes buffers to maintain service while minimizing inventory. Embedded Power BI analytics make performance transparent, and seamless ERP integration ensures data accuracy and fast deployment.

See how Intuiflow can help your organization move from forecast-driven complexity to demand-driven flow.

👉 Book an Intuiflow demo here to see how it can help you unlock results.