From Ferrara comes a company that has redesigned tech services for companies and that has always known how to reinvent itself over the years. Because the key to success is having a strong identity, but also the innate ability to adapt to the new challenges of the time. Giampaolo Colletti interviews Enrico Zuffellato, CEO of Zuffellato Technologies, for FARE INSIEME
by Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Photocredit: Giacomo Maestri e Francesca Aufiero
This is a typical Italian story. Or rather, we could say Emilian in its most beautiful sense. Because it tells of passion, proactivity, entrepreneurship. A story that was born in that laboratory that still today sets a precedent in the world represented by Olivetti. So actually it brings together Ivrea with Ferrara, and very soon we will understand why. A predominantly female family story made of perseverance, vision, even audacity. Because it takes courage to become an entrepreneur from being an employee. In other words, as… enterprisingemployees. It all started fifty years ago when Vittorina Nori worked in one of Olivetti's departments and the company - that was constantly growing - gave her the opportunity to open branches throughout Italy. Here then was the opportunity: to start an entrepreneurial journey in the IT field starting from her own experience. In the early days, together with Vittorina, there was her husband Giovanni Zuffellato. These were the embryonic beginnings of that first computerisation of offices mainly linked to furniture, calculators and Olivetti brand computers. An entire IT era that then gave way to change. We are located in Ferrara and the company described is Zuffellato Technologies, which today has 20 collaborators for a turnover of 2 million euros with 500 active medium-large sized clients on the Italian market, although a shift of business to Europe is also expected. «If I had to identify a difficult moment, the 2010 crisis was certainly the worst, but it also allowed us to reflect and change our business model, moving from hardware to software. In short, we were born in the office sector and continued with products for professionals, business software and then, with the intuition of a collaborator in the agri-food sector that is now the flagship, we entered the market with traceability and food safety tools», says Enrico Zuffellato, a forty-year-old second-generation entrepreneur, who studied economics at the behest of his mother and father - because they, as he himself recalls, could not afford university - and then joined the company in 2008 with the support of his mother and his sister Barbara, a computer engineer.
Company profile. This is how Zuffellato Technologies was born, active in the Information Technology sector since 1975. It all started as a company specialised in consulting and automation of business processes. But then it evolved over the years, anticipating the needs of the market and accompanying companies along the path of digital transformation. This is where technical skills and innovative vision come together. The approach is focused on listening to the specific needs of the customer, with the aim of providing digital tools that are not just software, but real allies in operational and decision-making management. «We have developed a strong vocation for innovation in the agri-food, manufacturing and logistics sectors, becoming a point of reference in particular for traceability systems, integrated ERP, production management and solutions for Industry 4.0. We believe that innovation is never an end in itself, but must be built around the people who use it. For us, technology has value only if it improves the quality of people's work, organisational well-being and the competitive capacity of companies», says Zuffellato. The company resells, produces and adapts software solutions with a consultancy and training approach. The average customers are SMEs with a turnover of up to 100 million euros and mainly linked to a production area of goods and services.
Time factor. We are located in Ferrara, but the market is national and global with first installations in Romania and Poland. We said it before: what makes the difference is the ability to rethink yourself. Well, the winning key for a successful organisation is to have a strong identity as well as the innate drive to adapt to the new challenges of the time. «We consider ourselves a fifty-year-old start-up; this is certainly the year of the greatest investments in technology that have ever been made in Zuffellato and we are convinced that this will lead to an evolution of our products for the market. Becoming aware of software compared to hardware was a big change for us, as was specialising in some key sectors, such as agri-food. Surely our future cannot fail to embrace Artificial Intelligence and so-called technologies “as a service”», concludes Zuffellato. Listening to yourself, which is so difficult and so precious for companies that know how to look ahead of time.
https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/
Read the other interviews
