Give us an overview about the Coesia Group.
Headquartered in Bologna, Italy, Coesia is a group of innovation-based industrial solutions companies operating globally. Coesia’s customers are leading players in health and beauty, consumer goods, tobacco, aerospace, racing and automotive industries. The group consists of 12 companies: ACMA VOLPAK, ADMV, CIMA, CITUS KALIX, FLEXLINK, G.D, GDM, HAPA, LAETUS, NORDEN, SACMO and SASIB. The group has 60 operating units (48 of which are production facilities) spread across 27 countries.
Of these companies, the ones relevant to the lifesciences and healthcare industry are FLEXLINK, HAPA, LAETUS, NORDEN and SACMO.
FLEXLINK is the leading provider of production logistics solutions to manufacturing industries, within the automotive, electronics, healthcare and fast moving consumer goods segments. HAPA manufactures ‘on demand’ printing systems for the pharmaceutical and cosmetic packaging industries. LAETUS produces on line packaging security and vision inspection systems for the pharma industry to verify presence, completeness and correctness of packaging materials and drugs. NORDEN designs, builds and supplies fully automated tube filling systems covering all speeds and applications within various segments: pharma, cosmetics, toothpaste, food and industrial. SACMO designs complete packaging machinery lines and supplies refurbishments of existing machines, maintenance on customer’s site, retrofit of machines in production, second-hand machines, customer training, manufacturing of machine parts, emergency service for part manufacturing and assembly of complete lines.
Tell us about your India operations.
Coesia had set up its base in Pune in January 2011, with the aim of supporting other Coesia Group companies operating in the strategically crucial Indian market, including G.D, ACMA VOLPAK, NORDEN, HAPA, LAETUS and GDM. This region is one of the first to be created specifically to fulfil one of Coesia’s primary objectives: to better exploit the opportunities offered by potential synergies between its component companies, in order to be able to meet the requirements of diversified clients in a better way. This will be one of the key aspects of Coesia’s strategy to consolidate its global technological leadership through its presence in the most important local markets. The opening of the Pune base also aims to reinforce one of the group’s hallmarks, namely its ability to work directly with its client companies, to listen to their requirements and to develop new solutions to meet their specific needs.
What are the advantages of operating from India?
The presence of Indian technicians will mean quicker and better understanding of the specific requirements of our customers. In recent years, VOLPAK has notably reinforced its presence in the Indian market, installing lines for a range of functions and sectors – from machinery for packaging sauces and drinks for the food industry to packaging machinery for the cosmetics, chemical and pharma industries.
Now, thanks to the opening of the new Coesia Region in Pune, VOLPAK can offer sales, technical and maintenance services to its clients. After an active plan identifying the supplier chain, training the technicians for machine assembly and set up, Volpak has started its commercial production of HFFS and VFFS machines in India.
For NORDEN, the COESIA company that specialises in the tube filling for FMCG and the pharma sector, the new centre in Pune will be able to supply solutions both on a technical level and in terms of customer service.
Present in India for the last two decades, HAPA and LAETUS will consolidate with the Group synergies and will offer effective sales, technical services, spares and consumables to customers through Coesia India’s regional branch offices in Mumbai and Delhi.
What is the focus of Coesia’s R&D activities?
The Coesia companies have always been technological leaders in their fields. The technological breakthroughs they created have changed the way machines are built, products are packaged and quality control is carried out.
Today, the Coesia Group can count on 840 highly specialised designers and technicians working in its Research & Development departments worldwide, on an intellectual property based on over 2,400 registered patents and on over 30 scientific cooperations with leading universities, research centres and institutions worldwide.
In addition, the Coesia Engineering Centre was created with the aim of both developing completely new process technologies and seizing opportunities originating from the cross-fertilization and technology transfer among Coesia companies. This allows our customers to benefit from a huge pool of innovative solutions at their disposal.
In the last few years our R&D has been committed to finding new solutions mainly in areas such as increasing production speed using new packaging materials, creating new packaging forms, developing new technical solutions for the production and packaging processes, applying new technologies for quality control and printing systems, increasing flexibility in format and brand change-over, reducing energy consumption in the production process.
In terms of sustainable innovation, we are committed to a responsible development of our business by using energy and resources in the most efficient way and minimising the environmental impact of our operations. To embed sustainability in every stage of the life-cycle of our products, our R&D is working to introduce new design techniques in the fields of fluid dynamics, thermal properties and electrical systems, in order to reduce electrical consumption (for electric motors, power supply in feed, cooling systems and vacuum generation for compressed air) and energy consumption in terms of tons of CO2e produced by our machine lines running at customer plants.
A practical example is ACMA’s ‘Green Machine’. ACMA’s new SP2-NG horizontal flow pack machine can reduce energy consumption by up to 30 per cent compared to traditional machines. Based on the concept that resources can be managed only if their use is measured and assuming that only what can be controlled can be optimised, the ACMA SP2-NG machine allows the operator to actually see during the operation how much energy the machine is using, both in general terms as well as for each product packaged. To achieve this goal, ACMA worked with Schneider Electric in a very fruitful collaboration.