Ansaldo Energia has selected the Kinaxis Maestro planning platform for its global supply chain, adding a new software layer intended to improve control of long-lead materials and complex manufacturing schedules across its power equipment business.
The Italian manufacturer chose Maestro after evaluating several planning platforms and will implement the system with PwC. Kinaxis says the project is intended to provide end-to-end visibility across supply and production, allowing changes in material availability, demand and manufacturing capacity to be considered together rather than through separate planning cycles.
Ansaldo Energia builds equipment whose production timescales make those dependencies unusually visible. Its portfolio includes gas turbines, steam turbines, generators and synchronous condensers, with large machines relying on castings, forgings, machined components, welded assemblies and specialist electrical equipment that can take months to manufacture and qualify.
The company’s Genoa industrial base illustrates the scale of the planning problem. Its Campi factory covers 219,000 square metres, including 131,000 square metres of buildings, and contains around 800 machine tools used for component manufacturing across several product families.
Processes include electrical discharge machining for turbine blades and TIG and submerged-arc welding for large turbine rotors. A GT36 rotor weighs about 160 tonnes and is close to 14 metres long, so production scheduling has to account not only for machine hours but also specialist fixtures, cranes, heat treatment, inspection and the sequence in which very large components can move through a factory.
Final gas turbine assembly takes place at Cornigliano, around 2.5km from Campi. The 13,500-square-metre site has four modular assembly stands and cranes with lifting capacity of up to 200 tonnes, while direct quayside access allows completed machines to move towards customers without depending entirely on road transport for oversized loads.
A planning delay at one point can therefore propagate through several physical constraints. A late forging may leave a machine tool unused, which can then displace machining for another programme, while a completed subassembly arriving at the wrong time can occupy limited factory space or compete for lifting equipment required elsewhere.
Maestro is built around what Kinaxis calls concurrent planning, where a change can be assessed across multiple supply chain functions without waiting for a sequence of separate planning runs. The practical value for Ansaldo Energia will depend on whether the software exposes conflicts early enough for procurement and production teams to act before they become factory stoppages.
Lorenzo M. A. Ferrari, supply chain and planning director at Ansaldo Energia, said: “We needed a planning platform that could give us complete visibility across our operations.” The company has tied the deployment to maintaining schedules for projects where component lead times and customer delivery commitments extend well beyond a normal monthly planning horizon.
The implementation arrives as Ansaldo Energia is rebuilding order intake and expanding activity. The company reported 2025 orders of €2.3 billion, up 24%, revenue of €1.2 billion, up 10%, and net profit of €20 million. Its 2026–2030 industrial plan targets revenue above €2 billion by the end of the period.
New gas turbine work is contributing to that production outlook. In July, Ansaldo Energia announced an order for eight AE64.3A gas turbines and generators for a data centre power project in Texas, with first deliveries scheduled for 2027. Large orders of that kind commit engineering, machining and assembly capacity well before finished equipment leaves the factory.
The company says around 80% of its supply chain is based in Italy. Geographic concentration can shorten transport and make supplier collaboration easier, but it does not remove bottlenecks where only a limited number of companies can produce particular forgings, castings, coatings or other qualified components.
Ansaldo Energia has already invested in factory digitalisation through its Campi and Cornigliano Lighthouse Plants. A €14 million programme has introduced manufacturing execution systems, simulation, big data analysis and additive manufacturing, putting more operational information around individual processes and production assets.
The Kinaxis project extends digitalisation further into the planning layer rather than controlling machinery directly. It cannot create another rotor forging or add machining capacity when a physical constraint is genuine, but it can show which customer programme is affected, whether material can be reallocated and what a change in sequence does to later production commitments.
That is a less spectacular use of industrial software than claims of autonomous factories, and a more measurable one. Ansaldo Energia already has the heavy machinery, qualified suppliers and assembly infrastructure needed to build its products; the question is whether its planning systems can keep those resources aligned as orders increase. Delivery performance and inventory levels will provide a rather clearer answer than the number of AI functions attached to the software description.
