MILAN – Simonelli Group won the 2021 Italian Industrial Excellence Award, recognition for excellence in the industrial and service sectors. The Company was a finalist of the European Edition together with important players in the business as Henkel, Nobilia, and TMG Automotive. During the final European event held this past January 27th, Simonelli Group presented with the other finalists how the Company develops and innovates its operational strategies, Top-down & Bottom-up, and how digitalization is adapted to transform the value chain.
Simonelli Group represents the Italian entrepreneurial culture
SDA Bocconi School of Management has been the academic partner of the Industrial Excellence Award since 2016. They selected Simonelli Group as a perfect match to represent the Italian entrepreneurial culture, denoted by small and medium enterprises.
“The Company is not based in usual North Italy but has its headquarters and production plant in a small town in the Marche region. – declares Prof. Alberto Grando, SDA Professor of Production and Technology of L. Bocconi University and academic co-director of the Italian award – They are an important example of how the market analysis and the strategy adopted since the ’60s allowed the company to create a strong positioning in foreign countries (at that time there were already many businesses with a high competitivity rate in Italy.) Now, the Company has a solid international presence and is a reference point for research, technological innovation, environmental sustainability, and design. The efficient and effective process management, human resource investment, and attentive organization favored a significant net growth (from 19 million euros in 2019 to 115 million euros in 2021). The profitability and client loyalty were generous even during these tough covid times”.
Simonelli Group is extremely flexible and customer-oriented
“The Industrial Excellence Award is a great initiative for those companies and managers that never sit still and do not pursue the status quo. These are companies that always try and reach new levels, exceed comfort zones, and importantly, reach excellence.” – said Francesco Gallmann, Senior Lecturer of the Production and Technology Unit of the SDA Bocconi and academic co-director of the Italian award. “Simonelli Group is an example: a productive process keenly customer-oriented and extremely flexible, able to quickly respond to any question, even during this pandemic period upon us, in which the company presented a series of improvements in energy consumption, CO2 emissions, quality, flexibility, and digitalization of its products and services.”
At the end of the event, won by Henkel, the participants positively commented on Simonelli Group, pointing out its great reality and how it can hear out and grasp the market’s demands and strongly contribute to the coffee industry’s growth. “Confronting ourselves with multinational businesses is a great inspiration for us and provides us with excellent advice on how to improve ourselves under different points of view – declares Fabio Ceccarani, CEO of Simonelli Group. “We are proud to have won the Italian award and have been one of the four European finalists together with the big players in the chemical industry, interior design, and automotive business. An important acknowledgment for all the work and results obtained so far goes to the entire Simonelli Group team”.
 About Industrial Excellence Award
Since 1995, the Industrial Excellence Award (IEA) competition benchmarks Management Quality for European competitiveness in the industrial and service sectors. This competition focuses on Digital Strategy Innovation and Deployment Top-down & Bottom-up: how organizations align distributed activities and knowledge to achieve common strategic goals. In the past, IEA awarded best practices for Lean Management (1st Edition) and Supply Chain Integration (2nd Edition); more recently, the focus has shifted towards Strategy Cascading and Employee Engagement for Operational Excellence (3rd Edition) and in the last Edition on Operations strategies top-down and bottom-up and use of digitalization to transform the value chain. IN THE PAST EDITIONS, the IEA went to ABB, John Deere, Continental, BMW, Volkswagen, Bentley, Vestel, Infineon, Hello Fresh, Grifols, and Henkel.
Thirteen premier business schools support the IEA: AESE Business School, Lisbon, Portugal; Cambridge Judge Business School, Cambridge, United Kingdom; ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; HEC Paris, Paris, France; IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain; IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland; KoÒ« University Graduate School of Business, Istanbul, Turkey; LCL, Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Rotterdam School of Management, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; SCA Bocconi, Milan, Italy; TU Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Vlerick Business School, Ghent, Belgium; and WU Vienna, Vienna, Austria. These business schools represent and manage the IEA in their own countries.
