Ivano Gerardi jr, sales and marketing manager of Gerardi spa., responded to our interview.
With what approach does your company operate in today’s complex market?
In commercial terms, our approach has not essentially changed, horizons have instead changed. Actually, already since the Eighties we have been addressing new markets like India and China, but nowadays we expect much more from them and we invest in them more regularly. Concerning the production, since 2008 we have been systematically presenting brand-new products every year, fruit of investments in research and development, as well as in machines and structures.
What are the outstanding requirements that arise in that context?
Today like yesterday, but even more, huge resources are necessary to develop new markets, to find new contacts and to support adequately the already active distribution channels, which operate in a highly competitive context. I’m referring in particular to Asian markets where dominate Chinese and Taiwanese, our reference competitors, and where it is neither easy nor fast to consolidate one’s own position, even proposing better solutions. Research and development need also huge investments, in terms of productive capacity, too.
What are your daily targets and the long-term projects?
Everyday our target is to satisfy whatever demand in real time, and therefore we always provide an answer, or even the final offer, within 24 hours. The long-term projects are several but the most imminent ones are the consolidation of the latest products in all the markets where we operate and the commercial penetration of North America through a diffused net of local agents and agreements with big distribution Groups. An unrealized dream, besides, is to become world leaders in the production of angle heads and driven tools, also through collaborations and partnerships with Italian or foreign companies, partly already started.
What are your top products or the greatest novelties?
Our core products, with novelties and developments in each family, are the traditional ones: precision modular vices, piece-holder cubes for horizontal centres, angle heads, driven tools. As far as vices are concerned, there are all the solutions for 5-axis centres, machine typology that is living the biggest development today. The piece-holder family has been recently widened by the complete zero point range, innovative solution for the fast, safe and precise tooling of vertical and horizontal machining centres, and not only. In 2012 angle heads witnessed the success of the brand-new Evolution family, which has allowed us to double the range of available heads and to offer highly performing products; the traditional Classic line, anyway, goes on meeting great success. In 2013, after the end of the collaboration with the American Parlec, we have satisfactorily relaunched driven tools intended for almost any lathe typology today available on the market.
In what terms do your products contribute in enhancing the productivity and the competitiveness of their users?
Thanks to vices and piece-holders and to the technical solutions that we propose, the machine tooling times are saved or almost completely zeroed and, at the same time, the achieved precisions increase, thanks to minor necessary setups. It is undisputed the possibility of accomplishing more operations with the same setup for heads and driven tools, therefore decreasing once more tooling idle times and improving precisions. In particular, relevant are the advantages provided by the modularity of the line of Evolution heads.
