Sustainability has always been a top priority at Working Process, approached in a comprehensive and all-round way. We discussed it with Filippo Schegginetti, marketing and communication manager of the well-known Emilia-based company.
Undoubtedly, being a “young” company and celebrating its first 25 years this very year has allowed Working Process to develop a strong “environmental awareness”, which is certainly one of the aspects of corporate life that is immediately perceived. “We firmly believe in it – explains Filippo Schegginetti, marketing and communication manager who has been serving on the board of directors for three years – and in every aspect of being a company, starting with the production areas and offices, fields in which we have adopted systems and solutions to minimise our consumption and to offer our teams comfortable environments that represent the right ‘setting’ in which to imagine, design and produce highly complex machines for the manufacture of windows and doors like those we offer.
For some time now we have had photovoltaic panels that allow us to produce more than 425 kW, an important contribution to our operations, also thanks to a 200 kW battery storage system. We try to work as much as possible with clean, self-produced energy and I must say that on sunny days we entirely cover our needs. All our technologies are ‘4.0’, therefore equipped with intelligent systems for the best management of consumption.”
“And we were among the first to realise that there is not only environmental sustainability, but that there is also social sustainability to be implemented day by day. For several years now we have been carrying out initiatives not only related to welfare for our employees, but also actions that have a tangible impact on the territory, working with associations and organisations that promote sport and other activities as moments of aggregation and care for the community and the territory.”
“Then there is the major chapter of the technologies we produce,” Schegginetti continues. “The transition to Siemens’ ‘Sinumerik One’ CNC has taken us into a new dimension not only in terms of automation and processing speed, but also in terms of energy saving. The amount of energy recovered through braking devices ‘Kers-Kinetic Energy Recovery System’ has grown significantly compared to previous controls, and the entire system intelligence works to ensure that energy is available where and when it is needed, conveyed in the most effective and economical way. This new development of our historic collaboration with Siemens, and the choice to equip all our machines, from the smallest to the most complete, with these controls, has allowed us to make a huge step forward, even in terms of sustainability. When at Working Process we talk about ‘technology without compromises’, it is not a slogan or a figure of speech. Today we achieve a reduction in energy consumption of our machining centres of up to 25 to 30 per cent compared to even the recent past.
We are well aware that when talking about consumption, extraction is the real issue to be addressed. In recent years we have increased our efforts in this area as well, using pneumatic shutters managed by the ‘machine system’ according to the machining in progress.”
An effort that your customers appreciate and acknowledge?
“Absolutely. Over the past ten years, those who come to see and test our solutions do not fail to ask questions about these aspects and, more generally, about the ‘sustainability’ of the machine. An attention that, we must admit, has become even more evident in light of government incentives that reward the most virtuous choices.
It must also be said that energy costs are no longer a certainty as they were ten years ago, and this, together with a growing and fortunately unstoppable environmental awareness, has undoubtedly also influenced investment choices in major capital goods.
At the same time, the need is growing to have skills, if not even technicians and professionals trained ‘ad hoc’, in order to work with data and make better decisions on how to manufacture a product, which decisions to prioritise, how to optimally manage after-sales service. All aspects that often have a determining effect on the ‘overall energy balance’ of a business. This is no longer a dimension experienced only by the ‘big players’, but one that, in due proportion, permeates the activities of companies of every size and level. This is the real revolution that Working Process has chosen to support. Information coming from the supplier alone is no longer enough. Data must be collected, understood, processed and integrated into one’s own reality in order to quantify or decide which advantage to pursue.
At this stage I am convinced that the increasingly massive entry of artificial intelligence will undoubtedly bring important and positive changes in resource management, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises that have been dealing with these topics for a shorter time. We experienced it first-hand with ‘Industry 4.0’, a measure that allowed precisely smaller companies to substantially renew their technologies. I would go so far as to say that today the world of small and medium-sized window and door manufacturers is almost unrecognisable. And the benefit was immediate, with product quality rising significantly.”
What still remains to be done?
“Although much has been done, much still remains to be done to bring our window and door manufacturing industry, whether small, medium or large, towards the creation of a product and the definition of an industrial system that is always up to date. We cannot think of producing doors and windows as we did twenty or thirty years ago. Technologies have changed, production logic has changed, the quality bar has risen, and by a lot. These are parameters that everyone will have to come to terms with, understanding that it is no longer possible to remain within one’s own ‘comfort zone’.
We are a hugely important manufacturing country, with skills and creativity that the world envies. It is a path on which we must run even faster if we want to maintain the positions we have gained, at the same speed with which we have understood the value of sustainability.”
How?
“Through knowledge, through the analysis of data and information that we mentioned earlier. Let me give you an example. Some time ago we monitored, for more than a week, all the production phases of one of our customers who wanted to know precisely the ‘energy weight’ of each element produced, starting from cutting right through to the piece ready to be painted. We managed to monitor even the smallest step, collecting a huge amount of data which was then made accessible and ‘understandable’, so that it could be summarised in an analysis that allowed us to draw conclusions and truly understand what had improved, where we had created entirely new conditions and where, above all, we might decide to concentrate our efforts in the near future.
An extremely valuable piece of work for our customer and also for us, because we put in black and white the results of the challenge we have pursued in recent years. Results that proved us right. These are, in my opinion, the building blocks for constructing the future of a sector that may seem so ‘traditional’ as the window and door sector, with the precise desire to continuously improve.
We are very careful to monitor the dynamics, the functioning, the performance and the consumption of what we design and manufacture, but this is work that must be done in a comprehensive way, involving everything that contributes to achieving our objectives: tools, software, extraction, handling and people.
I say this because among our horizons there is precisely the desire to go beyond our machining centres, bringing our vision and our methods into everything that comes before, after and around them. The great challenge that has already been on our table for some time is ‘process engineering’, which is absolutely decisive also in terms of energy consumption and environmental correctness of a production cycle.
We must observe, understand and interpret even more than we already do. Perhaps not everyone knows that six months or a year after the installation of one of our machines we go back to customers to verify that everything is in order, not only with regard to what we supplied, but also in terms of optimising the process in all its complexity. This is an integral part of what we have chosen to be and of our desire to remain alongside those who have chosen us, moving forward together.
It is no coincidence that around the world there are customers who have purchased a second, a third, a fourth machine from us. And I assure you, we are not talking about small solutions, but about giants that can involve investments of several million euros and that in many cases have been decisive in opening new stories, transforming small companies with a few employees into businesses with 30 or 40 staff…”
We can now only conclude this conversation. What can we add?
“… probably with great pleasure by mentioning that just in recent weeks we moved from a ‘silver’ rating to ‘gold’ in the ESG certification (a recognition issued by a third-party body attesting a company’s compliance with environmental, social and governance sustainability criteria, ed.) which we have held since 2019. A result achieved by paying the utmost attention even to the smallest element, including the fuel consumption of our vehicles. A complex work of measurement and control, but one that makes us feel part of a global commitment with an objective far too important to be underestimated.
And, as I said before, we find this same attention every day in our customers and in the suppliers we have selected. A company must be alive, vital, serene and proactive. There is no longer any space for businesses that pollute, that make people unhappy, that do not care about how what they produce will impact the environment throughout its entire life cycle. Fortunately, those who do not adopt a virtuous mindset, from every point of view, will soon be driven out of the market. We are certain of this.”
