Investing in automation, investing in competitiveness

Strong evidence (quality always pays back) and a few surprises (delocalization as such doesn’t pay) in a meeting that presented the latest Sda Bocconi survey on technology related to innovation and competitiveness.
Investing in process innovation is an effective tool to support the growth strategy of a company; it allows to enhance industrial performance as well as the competitiveness of enterprises and the whole country. In a nutshell, this is what came out from the “Investing in automation, investing in competitiveness” meeting, which opened the Technology Exhibitions Week in Fieramilano. Organized by Fiera Milano Tech with the scientific contribution of Sda Bocconi, the meeting focused on the relationship between automation and technological innovation for enterprise competitiveness, completing the research by the University with an interesting set of case histories.
The meeting started off with Fabio Dadati, President of Fiera Milano Tech, and Vincenzo Caprari, President of Fluidtrans Compomac. Then the market research was presented in short. “The relationship is particularly important – highlighted Enzo Baglieri, head of the production and technology unit of Sda Bocconi – because it highlights a proper industrial strategy able to face the current global economic challenges successfully, but also greater safety and an ideal production quality-speed ratio, which is increasingly shifting to the benefit of quality”.
With a survey on 222 industrial companies, Baglieri came to the conclusion that high-innovation companies boast the highest growth rates. Among these, those who have decided to bet on quality – keeping direct control of the supply chain, without outsourcing or decentralizing some operations – have even better performance.
59 out of 222 companies recorded growth rates above 10 percent, thanks to investments in the automation and organization of production processes, besides a 2/3 reduction of defects compared to competitors who are not willing to innovate technologically or those who chose to move out to countries with low labor costs but often poor quality.
“Italy has its own peculiarity – said Baglieri – which shows a typical contradiction of our industrial production system. We are below the European average regarding the ration of R&D spending to Gdp, and less than the half of the Us, just one-third compared to Japan, but then we are one of the first suppliers of innovative products in terms of percentage on our industrial turnover.
Italian creativity and ingenuity is essential for product innovation, but then we are not able to maintain this supremacy by adapting our production process, where innovation is still a casual and not systematic activity, not organized and not monitored as it should be.
We should follow the Japanese model – concluded Baglieri – An industrial approach where 70 percent of resources are dedicated to process innovation with enhancements in automation and technology and just 30 percent directly on the product. With the benefit that Italy has an incomparable creative capacity”.
Significant case histories were presented by entrepreneurs and industrial group managers. The examples were illustrated by Adriano Celi (general manager of Scm Group), Mauricio Dite Rumorino (automation process manager of Dalmine), Luca Galbiati (research and production manager of Kone Industrial), Riccardo Morselli (innovation competence center director of Cnh), Pierandrea Pracchi (product and process innovation manager of Indesit) and Gianluigi Viscardi (president and general manager of Cosberg).
“Our companies – concluded Alberto Grando, director of Sda Bocconi – have to understand it’s vital to invest on research and development, not only for excellence companies. To do so, capitals are needed and to get them, even from abroad, we have to be open and sensitive to this subject. Product, design and quality are not the only things to think about. Copying a product is very easy. Imitating a valid production process is more difficult. Almost impossible is transmitting skills and HR experience gathered within a company. Winning the challenge of the global market means developing and adopting this behavior as a good example”.