Mr Roberto Graziosi, Sales Manager - Southern Asia and Pacific, Salvagnini Group, talks to Industrial Products Finder about the company and its successful foray in the Indian market. Excerpts:

Salvagnini Group will be completing 50 years this year, give us a brief outline of your company since inception, and your operations in India.

Salvagnini is a company that since its early days believes technology and automation can help humankind to evolve towards a better quality of life and well-being. Salvagnini systems have revolutionised the manufacturing standards and nowadays the company is focused on introducing more and more innovation in the years to come and on setting new standards, as we recently did with our fibre laser that has changed the meaning of laser-cutting.

In India, we are offering customers the complete solution for their sheet metal factories providing application support and service through our local team.

Brief outline of your product range and their applications

Salvagnini is a company focused on sheet-metal processing equipment: we are known for our fully automatic benders P4, P2, and with the recently new born P1 we have brought the concept of automatic panel bender to a new entry level.

In addition to the family of panel benders we have the press brake range which include our servo machines E3 and "kinetic" B3 that combine speed, precision and lower running costs, with their innovative design.

The L3 fibre laser systems have increased their range adding the new 4 kW source to the 2 kW and 3 kW sources, making the fibre laser suitable for all the applications. To complete the range of products we have the S4 punching-shearing system and the SL4 laser-punch combination.All Salvagnini systems can be integrated with state-of-the-art automation and be part of more complex FMS (flexible manufacturing system), which are customised for customers' applications and size; they can carry out the entire process of cutting-bending-punching sheet-metal parts.

What are the focus markets for your products in India and overseas?

In India and overseas, we successfully supplied several different industries like steel office furniture, doors, electric switchgears, elevators and many subcontractors, with our systems. The flexibility of our systems makes them suitable for many different applications and many of our customers are just subcontractors without a specific product range. We are also looking to enter into other industries in India such as lighting manufacturing, air conditioning, refrigeration, catering equipment, etc.

What are the specific advantages of using your products?

In India, like in many other developing countries, the focus of our products and integrated automation is to raise manufacturing standards. Automation has started to be attractive in places with low labour cost because it can increase process efficiency with lean manufacturing.The reduction of WIP and material scrap rate together with the possibility to improve design, quality and output volume make the end products cheaper and better. Elaborate on your manufacturing locations, location of plants, investments, technology and human resources.

The Salvagnini Group consists of 4 manufacturing plants: 3 in Europe (2 in Italy and 1 in Austria) and one in the USA. The total number of employees is 1350 working in the main manufacturing plants and in the branches worldwide. The R&D takes place in Europe where we manufacture all of our systems. The company has been focused on investing in the new developing markets and India is the last branch and was opened 2 years ago.

For engineering innovations - outline your company's focus on R&D

The company focus is to achieve better machine performance and lean manufacturing at a more accessible price in order to become more interesting also in developing markets like India: automation has to be seen primarily as an aid to increase machine efficiency and reduce the overall cost of manufacturing. Having machines with high performance but manually operated would result in a low overall output and higher production cost. In the whole process the cost of labour is just a small percentage of the total cost.

What about Quality Assurance Measures?

In our company we follow all the standards to deliver quality products. The whole manufacturing process carried out in our plants and outside by our contractors in Europe is constantly monitored and improved. Latest software and equipment help our engineers to carry out high standards quality controls on all the components of our system prior to assembly to ensure peace of mind to the end users.

What are the key drivers of your industry?

The key drivers are: Automation, Flexibility, Repeatability, Accuracy, Output and Design. The combination of the above has generated Salvagnini's success: a system that can run unmanned, capable of producing different types of parts without tools' set-up, with high accuracy and repeatability and with the possibility of applying new innovative designs. This is all about our company: revolution in the sheet-metal manufacturing process.

How do you view the growth prospects of your industry in India?

India is a country with a huge potential for growth: in several fields the industry is not yet as developed as it is in the western world and today not all the companies have the capability of securing important credit lines with banks to invest in automation and top end machines. In future, the business model here will require a more efficient manufacturing and the Salvagnini systems will be more and more in the equation for medium and small size companies.

What is the Vision Statement of your company in India? What expansion plans do you foresee for your India operations?

The vision we have for India is bright and we foresee a big expansion for our business here. One thing that is missing today is an adequate financial system to support the entrepreneurs in their activities, helping them to choose the best equipment for their manufacturing plans. With more installations in the country our service support team as well as the application support team will grow: providing the best technology also implies helping the customers to use it in the best way with expert people ready to advise on design improvement with the aim to have better products with a more competitive price.

What are the marketing strategies responsible for the success of your products in India?

People say that a good product is not successful because of the marketing behind it and I can agree on this statement; however, how to make our technology known to the large number of potential Indian customers has been a big challenge. Sometimes it is very hard to reach many of them considering the size of India and to help in this we have participated at several exhibitions and organised technical seminars in the past years. At the end, the best advertisement for us is to have a growing number of satisfied customers and a lot of successful stories of co-operation between Indian companies and Salvagnini.

What are the significant achievements in the company's history?

Since incorporation in 1963, Salvagnini has led the world of innovation in the sheet-metal industry: in 1977 we had the first automatic panel bender and 2 years later the first FMS (flexible manufacturing system) able to punch, cut and bend sheet metal in one single system. In 1985 we installed the first "lights-out" factory: with the use of internet, which was still not available for private use like it is today, we could control our machines operating unmanned in the USA from Europe. In 2009 we installed the first L1Xe fibre laser cutting machine which was a hit worldwide and set the new standards in the laser cutting technology.

To sum up, what are the key strategic moves that have engineered the success of the company?

Local support with trained service teams able to support all the existing customers is the key. We can combine the standards of the European industry and better serve our customers with fast response and speaking the same language. Salvagnini Machinery India was incorporated 2 years ago and now we have engineers based in the biggest industrial estates of India. It is just the last of a growing number of branch offices worldwide.