“The Revolution of Efficiency” and “Think Thin”: fundamental books for the thin sheet metal processing industry
2020 shone a light on very important issues for all production companies, such as production sustainability, safety and automation.
Publishing my first book was a source of satisfaction that exceeded all expectations. That was undoubtedly in part due to the excellent feedback I received, both personally as a professional and as a company.
Above all, however, because of readers who later became customers and found inspiration – and new profits – from reading my work.
“The Revolution of Efficiency” has allowed me to share with you all, managers and entrepreneurs, the elements that make business processes more efficient: we saw that Sustainability, Productivity, Flexibility and Automation are the basis for the most profitable industrial processes.
To find out more about the book “The Revolution of Efficiency“, click HERE
After this first work, I still had a lot of material that I’d written and collected over the past years. Material that was to be used for the internal training of our engineers, but which could also be highly valuable to our customers.
These articles mainly concerned the design and manufacture of thin sheet metal products and, consequently, our main markets for their use: rolling shutters, Venetian blinds, profiles for drywalls and suspended ceilings.
I finished my first book in March 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. At the time, I could never have imagined that a year later we would still be in a very similar situation: albeit with the prospect of overcoming it, thanks to vaccines, of course.
It’s clear that many things have changed and that we will probably not return to the normalcy we knew.
Personally, I discovered that thanks to videoconferencing we’re able to manage very complex projects much better, co-designing entire systems with our customers in foreign countries and in different branches, while remote assistance has become a strategic asset for us and for our customers.
So: I think we’ll probably keep lots of the “good habits” we ended up adopting this year.
The greater the social distancing and the greater the automation, the more we are able to make our processes “pandemic proof”
At a production level, the pandemic has also led us to understanding the impact it can have on our production (pandemic proof production processes).
Advanced production systems, with high automation, are one of the main technologies defined as “enabling” in Industry 4.0: connected machines, easily controllable remotely and requiring a minimum number of personnel.
The pandemic has undoubtedly also been an accelerator, for companies that had not yet embarked on the transformation path towards 4.0 technologies: therefore, evolution or extinction.
In November 2020, all these considerations led to me making a decision: I would collect all the material that had already been produced on the design of thin sheet metal products, Industry 4.0, software and teleservice, and I would rewrite it in the form of an operating manual.
The importance of “think thin”
My first book, “The Revolution of Efficiency“, is transversal and its concepts also apply to areas of production outside of sheet metal processing.
This new book, on the other hand, had to be even more specific and deal with the issues that I face most frequently with my customers, especially in the field of thin sheet metal processing.
The manual is divided into chapters that address different topics: the design of excellent thin sheet products, Industry 4.0 applied to sheet metal production systems, automatic product quality control, the importance of software in advanced production systems and so on.
As for the first book, the title came to me like a bolt out of the blue: I was driving back from abroad, alone. I had just met several customers on a trip that took me to Germany and Austria. Together with one of them, we’d faced what he regarded as a fundamental problem: due to the increase in the cost of raw materials, it was essential for his product to be redesigned using thinner sheets, while maintaining quality and performance.
Reducing the thickness would, at the end of the year, lead to savings of millions of Euros.
It was necessary to “think” about thinner sheets, so…: Think Thin! Our specialization in the design of thin sheet products, I thought, would become a strategic asset for our customers!
This reflection led to an article on the impact of the cost of raw material, which you can find HERE, and then I used it for the title of this new book.
By the way, before anyone says that this title is similar to an Apple ad, let me confirm something: I always liked their ad, featuring a photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out and the title “Think different.”
Here’s what “Think Thin” means to us
“Think thin” means thinking about all business processes in terms of sustainability, productivity and profitability.
It means knowing everything about the raw materials, the product, the process and data management to continuously improve the performance of your company.
“Think thin” means knowing and using technologies that use all the material, saving up to and even over 20% of raw material and 70% of energy for the same product!
In this new book of mine, we’ll discover together that sustainable processes are also the most profitable for our companies.
And how automation makes all processes safer – and pandemic-proof.
My book “Think Thin” will be available this summer in Italian, English, German, French and Spanish: to book your copy, write us at [email protected]
Andrea Dallan
CEO – Dallan Spa