The pride
of being Emilian, the courage of always tackling new challenges, the audacity
of making unconventional choices that have proven winning, such as the
Maranello facility. For Fare Insieme, Giampaolo Colletti interviewed Claudio
Sabatini, founder together with historic partner Flavio Fallarini and
administrator of CIGAIMPIANTI
di Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Organisations
- whether big or small - just like people who form part of them, are the result
of the places where they are born and have grown up in, of the relationships
they establish, of their capability of intercepting and making their own those
values that, over time, become a compass to finding the way even during the
toughest times. After all, organisations are just like people, they reflect the
choices made over time when, with stubbornness and often with a good dose of
recklessness, people try to make a difference. All of this can be gathered from
the forty-year history of CIGAIMPIANTI - an entrepreneurial journey over time
and, most of all, space with a strong link to its territory, community and
roots. Those same roots that forge people and, therefore, organisations.
To explain
ourselves a little better, let’s take you to Finale Emilia, a town of 15
thousand people and the easternmost in the Modena province. “Far away
from everything but, at the same time, close to everything. However, anyone
wanting to attend a technical school necessarily had to go to bigger cities
such as Modena, Bologna and Ferrara. It was normal for us to get up early in
the morning and return late afternoon or evening. This became useful once we
started working,” reminisced Claudio Sabatini, founder and administrator of
CIGAIMPIANTI. His extended family,
as he himself describes it, is made up of 130 people including workers and
office staff for a market as wide as the whole world. Then there are the
clients, who substantially make up two groups: those linked to the production
facilities, located within one hundred km and with whom annual maintenance
contracts are stipulated and the manufacturers of automatic machines and
processing lines, with whom we work all over the world for installations,
start-ups, assistance and maintenance. “The most rewarding part is linked to
the testimonies of our clients, who choose us not because we are the cheapest,
but because they trust us. To cite a few examples, we have been supplying our
services to a food company in Medolla for 32
years and to a company in Modena dealing
with robotics for 29 years. Everything
in the sign of continuity,” stressed Sabatini. In the beginning, most of the
work was linked to systems, hence the name CIGAIMPIANTI but, over time, market
changes have pushed the company in other directions. So, today, the most
popular words are automation and maintenance. Technologies but, most of all,
people i.e. that human capital that makes the difference. Turnover is linked to
technician performance which, in a year, reached an overall total of 300,000
hours. “On 30th April 2022, we will celebrate our 40th anniversary, and we are
still growing. We have obviously found the right recipe. In the meantime, our
desire to please all our clients’ requests has remained unchanged. We preferred
growing gradually. Also because we have seen many businesses start our same
work only to melt away like snow in the sun just a few years later. As we do
not sell products but, rather services, we renewed ourselves focusing on the
ongoing training of our technicians with continuous courses. Then there is the
central aspect of safety: we invest a lot of time and money on this aspect
because we want our technicians to arrive home every evening without breaking
one single nail,” said Sabatini.
The strength of the territory. Roots, as we mentioned earlier. The
entrepreneurial choices of this Emilian gem have always been oriented towards
the proximity to the places where it operates. There is an authentic
physicality, which makes the headlines in this digital world marked by the
pandemic. But it is a choice that has proven a winning one. Being there for
real. Just like when, in 2006, we decided to build a new facility in Maranello,
in the heart of that district of excellence. Not a casual choice. “It was a
period when we worked a lot with some multinationals that had and still have
facilities not far from Finale Emilia. The work was such that, at a certain
point, I realised we were neglecting one of the richest and most industrialised
areas in Europe, the ceramic district and all those businesses that surrounded
it. An area where we had lots of relations to enhance. We were however
penalised by having to move all the time, with two hour transfers and at least
130 km a day,” recalled Sabatini. Thus an intuition came: at that time when
many businesses moved their facilities and relative productions elsewhere and
mainly abroad - the delocalisation process that mostly concerned Eastern Europe
- the solution for Sabatini was multiplying the facilities and employing
locals. A reversed delocalisation. “An opportunity for the community, for us
and for the clients who would have a service at their doorstep and which would
cost less due to the reduced transfer costs,” explained Sabatini. The future
lies in industry 4.0, but not only that. “In modern factories 4.0, machines can
do amazing things but, to please clients, the central aspect is linked to human
resources. Advanced research matters enormously because we work for avant-garde
businesses, but our most important research focuses on... searching for good,
professional and reliable technicians (something that has become extremely
rare...),” concluded Sabatini. For this Emilian entrepreneur, the future holds
the ambition to continue with ongoing growth in the name of responsibility. So
here is the recipe to win global challenges starting from specific territorial
contexts - using the head and the heart, together with those roots that make
all the difference.
https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/
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