From: Corriere.it
Small business makes big-name marques more competitive. From design to finished car in eighteen months
PINEROLO − The approach along broad, carless roads is lined with
silent industrial buildings and empty factory forecourts. But that
silence, the soundtrack of recession, is only on the outside. Inside,
you can hear at once that Italy needs thousands, tens of thousands, of
factories like this to defend its place in the industrial aristocracy of
the West. Even so, Provel at Pinerolo counts for quite a lot on its
own. With a staff of just thirty, it helps to transform the productivity
of many of Italy’s best-known marques, enabling them to compete faster
in international markets.
Provel, owned by the US 3D Systems company, is a parts printer
for eyewear, dentures, racing car instrument panels and fully diecast
engine components – incredible jewels of technology that would be
impossible to reproduce by hand. Here in the foothills of the Alps is an
outpost of the new industrial revolution that, in Italy as elsewhere,
is growing out of decades of earlier innovation. Provel was set up in
the Nineties by a Veneto-born chemist called Giorgio Buson. It makes
prototypes for companies that could never have imagined they would be
listed together in the Provel order book, including Ferrari, Fiat and
Volkswagen’s Italdesign as well as luxury and fashion labels like
Pomellato, Gucci, Bulgari and Luxottica, white goods producers Indesit
and Electrolux, aircraft manufacturer Aermacchi and denture
manufacturers. This is where prototypes of Formula One cars are made for
Ferrari (and for its rival Red Bull), of compact saloons for the
squeezed middle class, of jewellery for the noveaux riches of Shanghai
and of sundry parts for household appliances, aircraft and even the
human body.
The advantage is that the prototypes slash time to market. A 3D
object is made using an injector which at each pass deposits five or ten
hundredths of a millimetre of an acrylic resin, a metal alloy, a wax or
a nylon powder. This is consolidated with a laser, or left to cool, and
then tested. Until the desired result is achieved. Mr Buson recalls:
“In the Seventies, it used to take six years from the designer’s first
sketches to release to market. Today, we’re looking at eighteen months,
and even that’s shrinking”. 3D prototype printing is the continuation of
that race by other means. One Provel with thirty staff at the heart of
an industrial system is enough to boost the competitiveness of groups
whose combined turnover is worth tens of millions of euros. Printing is
done inside machines that look not unlike large fridges. Some groups,
Electrolux and Luxottica among them, opted in the end to buy the kit
from Provel and carry out this phase of new product development
in-house. There are also microwave oven-sized machines costing about a
thousand euros for families. They print handles, cutlery, imitation
jewellery and chess pieces at a temperature of 190 °C. Provel also
supplies the software to design these articles.
Giorgio Buson, 63, was born into a Padua farming family. Nothing
about his background hinted that he might end up at the centre of this
silent revolution. Nothing, except one detail – the postwar nationalised
chemical industry had located Montedison at Porto Marghera. Buson
studied chemistry, hoping to find work in the nearby industrial zone,
and started out selling resins. One day at a trade fair in Germany, he
saw some prototype machines and decided to invest in them. He grew the
business using internally generated funds – no bank loans – and
eventually found himself working for the Ferrari wind tunnel when
Schumacher won seven world titles, partly thanks to aerodynamics. Then
in 2010, when 3D Systems of Rock Hill, South Carolina, was looking for a
company to invest in to bring printers to Europe, Provel was ready.
International capital and technology plus the creativity of a self-made
Italian sit at the heart of a living industrial system. Perhaps the din
of busy factories could yet ring out again in Italy’s thousands of
Pinerolos.
14 maggio 2013 | 12:46© RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA
English translation by Giles Watson
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