Insight

Welcome to the 2024 Janus Perspective, a unique feature that includes a wide cross section of global fastener business leaders. Named after the Roman God 'Janus' – who had the ability to look to the future and to the past, and was often depicted with having two faces – this feature brings together thought leaders from every facet of the industry, from around the world, to give us their retrospective on 2023, as well as prospects and challenges for 2024.

Nicola Sartore, CEO

The urgency to adjust our business perspective and development strategy to shorter economic cycles – linked both to the contraction of economic activities and to the overstock in the supply chain – whilst not losing focus on the investments needed to grow, even in a time of business contraction, is what we will recall as the main topic of 2023. 

With this in mind, for 2024 we have already approved a new two year plan with investments for a further warehouse expansion of approximately 1,500m² in Ostrava in the Czech Republic, as well as starting the evaluations to expand from 9,000m² to 14,000m2 at our production plant in Italy. In fact, we even invested in the Italian production site in 2023 in order to increase the digitised imprint on all the processes – by completing the full data digitisation for all the development, production and delivery processes. This was a process we started over 10 years ago, with the first implementation of a MES system that has step by step changed completely the way in which we manage the company. Practically everything in the company, from wire, machine data, tools, to operators, are now identified with QR or barcodes, contributing to the data mining needed to analyse and plan actions in a continuous improvement policy. 

I think the increase of data throughout the supply chain in the coming years will be the key for further improvements, moving a step forward from the present standard of ‘simple’ stock visibility to more advanced systems, both on documents and ‘live’ production data. 

On the document side, that means that a series of reports that are already basically on demand, such as full traceability reports on the production steps of each batch, will be available online – with ‘live’ production data available for customers. This will give access to a continuous production data flow and ensure control of processes and quality. This will create added value to the continuous request for efficiency in the supply chain, as well as providing a sensible step forward in transparency, which is now more needed then ever with the new European regulations on the sources of the parts. For this reason, we think the availability of data will be a driver, as well as quality and price, in the future of the supply chain, which is why we are trying to head in this direction with the planned investment in R&D.

Our mission has always been to focus on customised solutions and on service, so as to become the competence centre for our customers in solving their fastening needs, which is why it was easy to define ‘customisation and digital integration’ as our guiding criteria in defining our R&D budget of 2024. 

Altogether the planned investments in equipment to increase our portfolio of customised stamped parts, as well as opening a project to empower our design process with the implementation of a software that will enable a more advanced sharing of information with the customer, and will help increase and improve the interaction throughout the design process, decreasing the risk of development mistakes and the lead time to develop customised parts – transparently showing ‘real time’ status for the development of internal tasks.