The company with passion - Giletta
Established in 1950, Giletta S.p.A has learnt, during many years of its existence, to increase its productivity in an exponential manner. Building on professionalism and experience gathered over the years, the company has achieved success. It has always maintained a direct relationship with its customers in order to be able to better understand and to satisfy their requirements in that it would offer industrialized but at the same time personalized products of high quality. In fact, characteristically for the company, it has always offered a wide range of products, diversified by high technology content and made in order to meet every requirement. These products include: salt spreaders, snow ploughs, airport equipments, vehicle installations, brine spreaders, snow blowers, dissolution station and electronic equipments, supported by the GPS system and the web.
In the course of many years of practice, the company has managed to develop strategies which have turned out to be most beneficial for its development. Among them acting actively, anticipating novelties, rather than having to follow solutions introduced by Giletta’s competitors, plays an important role. Pursuing this way of thinking, the company decided to confront the upcoming year of the world’s economic crisis in the same manner as it did in 2009, that is, by continuing the development of its products and enhancing their quality. Accordingly, it adopted two equivalent ways: (1) implementing the system of quality according to the recent ISO 9001:2008 norm and the environmental management system (EMS) (Environmental Certificate ISO 14001:2004); (2) producing new models of spreaders applicable both in winter highway maintenance and airport winter maintenance. This enabled the company to hold its position on the market which grows more and more competitive.
Production and organization
Giletta S.p.A. has been present on international markets for 60 years. It has always invested its efforts in technological innovation and paid attention to the development of the market. In 2006, at the international AIPCR congress in Turin, it presented a spreader, called UniQua, which, as the first spreader in the world, can get supply by means of three interchangeable feeding systems. Moreover, the company presented a system which is called Route Replay. UniQua is a high quality spreader destined for medium weight vehicles and therefore for the branch of the market addressed to large highway maintenance. The name of the spreader expresses the idea of the product: UniQua, that is the only equipment of that sort, highly industrialized, with diverse combinations of feeding systems, salt supply, and facilities. This, all in all, proves that it is constructed exactly for the demands of every single customer. Thanks to this, in a single hopper one can insert different cartridges for different systems of feeding (such as the Auger, a rubber belt or a chain). The system of salt transportation, which is most productive and recommendable, remains however a chain system. The latter is aimed at reconciling innovative technical choices capable of ensuring high performance and eliminating the main problems of salt spreaders, such as for instance the „bridge effect”, with great reliability in all working conditions. It should also be emphasized that the idea of equipment which is industrialized but also at the same time personalized has been employed when designing the latest spreader of middle dimensions: One, which was introduced in the second half of the last year. Route Replay represents a solution which is ideal for all those who want to integrate the traditional functionality of navigation with the complete automatization of the spreader. Thus, even a completely inexperienced driver can carry out ordinary works in winter road maintenance, without the risk of making mistakes, by simply choosing an appropriate route and following the indications of driving. All of the parameters are self-regulated on the basis of settings adjusted in the phase of programming. The driver is therefore concentrated exclusively on driving the vehicle, without getting distracted, which usually happens in difficult road conditions. Route Replay allows to memorize proceedings of the spreader by means of complicated self-learning algorithms, or a special desktop software. In this way, it modifies circuits in which it is possible to choose the beginning, the end and the intermediary phases, in the way that allows of variations in the functioning of the machine, in accordance with the road conditions at any given moment. In order to develop new products, the technical department of the company uses the most sophisticated 3-D projection software. It also benefits from the advice of the specialists from the Technical University in Turin (Politecnico di Torino the University of Engineering), as regards the development of brand new electronic software. Creating assembly lines makes it possible to consider the company’s products as ones of industry, rather than craftsmanship. This in turn allows to reduce the time of deliveries and to standardize the quality of the product. Apart from that, maximum production efficiency can be achieved once the CANBAN delivery system has been applied in order to ascertain on-time and accurate deliveries, to avoid inertias and the increased costs entailed by the application of the traditional, less flexible storage system. Quite recently, the Research and Development department has focused on developing a new sort of control boxes which are supposed to integrate the standard functioning of a tachometric control box (the choice of shedding parameters, such as dosage, direction/asymmetry, breadth, the percentage of humidification etc.) with the control box of a snow blade, the GPS cartography aimed at the possibility of directly gaining access to the company’s services through the Internet, and the monitor of a rear view camera attached to a vehicle, and that without the help of any supplementary equipment. This new sort of control boxes, EcoSat10, was presented in preview to the World Road Association’s (PIARC’s) meeting, held in February 2010, in Quebec (Canada). Every year the company invests a considerable part of its own resources in financing both the research and development of its own products and in supplying factories with new machines. This year, for example, a new production line for spreaders and a new robot station for automated welding will be introduced. These investments are indispensable in order to face the challenges raised by the market which is continually expanding.
Markets
The principal markets of Giletta S.p.A. are to be found within the area of the European Union (mainly Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria), Eastern Europe (mainly Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey, the Baltic States, and, most significantly, the Russian Federation), the Middle East (Syria and Iran), the Far East, and the Americas. Currently, the most important customers originate, as it has always been the case, from Italy, France, Spain, and in general from Western Europe. Recently we have been witnesses to a powerful tendency towards expansion on the east-European markets and those of the Russian Federation – suffice it to think about the company’s equipment being delivered for MKAD in Moscow and for the highway leading from Moscow to Minsk. It is also these days that the customers tend to expect that products should be competitive from the economical point of view but at the same time they should be marked by high quality and tight delivery times. For the moment, the products offered by the company and its competitors have really achieved the maximum performance. It is thus the task for the forthcoming years to ensure reliability at an increasingly higher level, and to reduce the costs of maintenance and related costs to minimum. Undoubtedly, the company aims at developing its products not only in the “mechanical” aspect, but it also attaches ever greater importance to the products’ electronic management, supported by GPS and the web.
In the future
It is expected that the development of the company’s market will be related with the increasingly greater influence of east-European markets in the post-Soviet states (the Russian Federation and the Commonwealth of Independent States). Finally, what is expected to contribute to the overall and also future success of the company are its following advantages: the ability to work in team, direct relations with the customer, „customer care”, the high quality and reliability of products at competitive prices, short delivery times, and last but not least direct relations between all who work for the company, regardless of their position in the hierarchy. Timeliness and flexibility are also very important as they enable, in every difficult situation, promptly and effectively to solve current problems. Giletta S.p.A. is a modern company, looking into the future, but at the same time with well-rooted knowledge acquired from past experiences.
Written by Anna Tomaszewska
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