A company was established in Bologna in 1982, which has become an excellence in the design and distribution of cables and components for industrial automation. Today TECO has a turnover of 60.7 million euros and 85 employees, it is an important reality for the territory and stands out for technological and customised solutions. Giampaolo Colletti interviews Giorgia Roversi, General Manager of TECO for FARE INSIEME
by Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Photocredit: Giacomo Maestri and Francesca Aufiero
«To talk about numbers, you build a story.» This is what the economist and Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller writes. Easy to say, harder to do. Actually, numbers occupy a significant and sometimes overlooked position. Numbers also help us understand stories, decode complexity, and give us an idea of the world. Numbers are stories that speak. And so in this story we want to start with numbers. One above all: twenty-five thousand kilometres. Because the company we are about to describe today sells an average of twenty-five thousand kilometres of cable per year in the world. Behind that number there is a lot of research, a constant obsession for excellence, teamwork and the ambition to make a difference. But there is also another number and another additional one that help us tell this story. A warehouse of fifteen hundred cable references and indeedfive thousand industrial components ready for immediate delivery. Welcome to TECO.
Company profile. We are in Bologna and the story of this company born from the needs of the industrial automation companies that have made the fortune of this territory, began in 1982 thanks to a visionary individual: Roberto Roversi. His has always been a healthy obsession for the customer. Or rather, for the “Mr. Customer”. «Dad was a son of the territory, one of the many talents who passed through that school of excellence that is the Aldini Valeriani in Bologna. He studied electronics and electrical engineering and then landed in the mechanical division of the GD group. Over time he decided to set up his own business as an agent and then create a distribution branch of the agency where he worked. Technical DNA has always been a key element in his career and in the companies he created. For him, it was important to provide solutions to customers and accompany them in their projects. After all, TECO was born from the needs of a customer who had moved to Ireland and Roversi created the company Te.Co. to meet his needs. He repeated it like a mantra: the reason for our company's existence revolves around the "Mr. Customer"», says Giorgia Roversi, who has held the role of General Manager of TECO for two years, after a generational transition that was managed successfully. With a degree in North American literature from the University of Bologna, a specialisation from the University of California and a Global Executive MBA from the SDA Bocconi in Milan, this manager worked for over fifteen years at YOOX Net-A-Porter, holding various positions of increasing responsibility. Then the desire to follow the entrepreneurial project by taking over the family business, which was founded in the same year she was born.
Valuable products. Today the company records a turnover of 60.7 million euros and has 85 employees. It stands out for its technical culture carried forward by a product development department with 18 dedicated people. The products are special components and cables, even with large diameters. Cables made of copper. Cables that carry signals, therefore that communicate, but also cables that move things. «For us, being a partner means starting from listening to the customer and then finding solutions that allow them to design and bring their machines and industrial plants to life. A product culture that has distinguished us since our birth and that we spread every day. Our cables are specifically designed and manufactured to guarantee the best possible features and performance in industrial automation. This means having dimensions, materials and approvals that meet specific requirements of the industrial sector. We offer all types of cables that are necessary for the electrical set-up of automatic machines in the industrial world», Roversi specifies. And then there are the automatic warehouses or automatic machines that do packaging and that move thanks to those cables. «We have recently integrated our offer with a line of products complementary to the cable: the TECO brand cable holes just launched on the market. We are also technological partners of important international companies, such as Rockwell Automation and Datalogic, who rely on us for the sale and above all the consultancy of their highly technological products», Roversi recalls.
The future, together. Four different generations work here, ranging from twenty-year-olds to sixty-five-year-olds. A team that bonds Italy, from Sicily to Piedmont. The team combines experience and innovation, with a focus on female leadership and on the growth of young talents, thanks to empowerment programmes and the in-house TECO_lab Academy. «We are working on four pillars: digitalisation, sustainability, team managerialisation and internationalisation. The strength of the district is what always makes the difference. The Emilian industrial fabric is part of our roots and is the source of our success: here there are large companies and SMEs that are the hard core of our customers. We grow and innovate together. Our territory is the home of Italian industrial automation. We are proud of it. My role in the near future will be dedicated to carrying forward and implementing in our daily lives the values that we have identified as vital for TECO and that will accompany our growth: to take care, to aim for excellence and to embrace the future», concludes Roversi. The pride of being born in that land of Emilia, which creates excellent companies by integrating people and technologies, and of bringing a successful company towards the future.
https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/
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