ARTELINEA spa: the Industry 4.0 revolution in a small business specializing in bathroom furniture

THE CHALLENGE
ARTELINEA spa is a Florence-based company that has been producing bathroom furniture, LED mirrors, wall and floor tiles, opalite sinks, lighting and accessories since 1962. It has 60 employees, 35 of whom are in production, and has a sales channel through agents and distributors with sales percentages of 80 percent for overseas and 20 percent for Italy.

In order to optimize its production process, the company decides to expand and digitize its machine park by taking advantage of the tax benefits of the Italian Transition Plan 4.0. For this reason, between 2020 and 2022, it buys and interconnects 6 BIESSE-marked machines: it is the beginning of a new, fully digitized way of working.

THE SOLUTION
The company adopts BIESSE SMARTCONNECTION “powered by RETUNER®” as its digital factory system for managing production orders: the MES software developed by Orchestra in collaboration with BIESSE. Released in a version specifically designed for small and medium-sized manufacturing companies specializing in glass and wood processing, it aims to connect production operators on any device to keep track of all stages of production, enabling them to record activities, stoppages, production progress and anomalies.

BENEFITS
With the introduction of SMARTCONNECTION software, the company has noted a number of benefits that have helped make its production process more efficient. These include:

• Increased ability to plan job processing due to its real-time tracking.
• Detection of processing times for more accurate and realistic estimates.
• Optimization of delivery time management.
• Better monitoring and control of the progress of the job order within the production process.

The product has turned the company’s production process around and met the expectations of ARTELINEA, whose owner, Massimo Gobbini, says, “SMARTCONNECTION allows interfacing different company functions (technical department, administrative department, and so on) and can be defined as a single platform to track production in different production departments (glass, stone, wood).”