iGuzzini's digital innovation at Fabbrica Futuro

The“Fabbrica Futuro” conference tour organized by the publishing house ESTE, reached Ancona on 26 June. One of the speakers, Francesco Ghergo, talked about iGuzzini's digital innovation is his speech titled "From smart products to the connected factory”. Established in 2012, Fabbrica Futuro is a multi-channel communication project involving all the players in the manufacturing world, aiming to connect the academic world with business innovators. An initiative aimed at comparing ideas, describing outstanding case studies and presenting the tools that help tackling the changes necessary to increase company competitiveness.
 
The central theme of the conference is the importance of incorporating digital technologies into the production system as a fundamental tool for innovation. In this context, Ghergo detailed iGuzzini’s digital ecosystem, which is structured on three levels: smart products and solutions; connected industry; training and involvement of human resources. An annual investment of 5 million euros aimed at increasing the efficiency of the whole value chain through smart interconnected solutions allowing to effectively adapt to the high variability in market demand, makes the entire organisational structure extremely dynamic and flexible. A crucial theme of Industry 4.0 is the importance of human resources, who have been playing a crucial role since the early stages of this transformation. The idea is not that they will be replaced by machines, but rather, that they will have to update their skillset. The importance of people is also emphasized by the World Class Manufacturing programme, a continuous improvement programme involving all resources in the elimination of waste and losses, typical to industrial plants, through rigorous implementation of methods and standards.