Giuseppe and Carmen Pariani
have worked together in
the machine tools trade for 40 years. For the last 15
years they have had their own company, Giuseppe
Giana spa.
The company is now run by their son and daughter,
Giulio and Carolina, but the enterprising spirit and pride
of the “self-made man” are still the keys to the
success
of the business. And the future of this Milanese company
lies in multitasking..
In Magnago,
in the province of Milan, Giuseppe Giana Spa is located in
10,000 square metres of buildings on a 30,000 square metre
lot. The company specialises in the design and construction
of parallel lathes with two and four guides and numerical
control, perforating and boring machines for deep boring with
or without numerical control and s u p e r f i n i s h i n
g machines. The company’s vast range of high tech machine
tools explains its success in Europe and all over the world.
The company was established about 15 years ago, putting to
work Giuseppe Giana’s vast experience and great ability
to anticipate technological progress gained in his previous
experience working with his three brothers. He set out on
the great adventure of establishing Giuseppe Giana Spa with
his wife, always to be seen at Giuseppe’s side, in life
as at work. Mrs. Giana tells us about this retiring, hardworking
man and his family, whose expanding its plants, offices and
pool of machine tools over the years. “This capacity
for growth was the product of my husband’s innovative
ideas. He was the youngest brother, and he always favoured
a mentality oriented toward the growth, typical of Italian
businesses of the 60s and 70s, focusing on technological innovation.
But Giuseppe felt the need to express these gifts of his in
full, which is why my husband and I decided to open our own
business, Giuseppe Giana Spa, in 1990, when we had been married
for 18 years. We brought our vast experience with us, but
left the company we came from all its product know-how. “And
so we set out on our own, focusing on mechanical work performed
on contract, but after 10 months in business, at the biennial
machine tools fair in Milan, we presented and sold our first
high tech perforating machine. This was Giuseppe Giana Spa’s
first clear signal to the market: we were not going to make
manual machines, but specialise in large machine tools and
highly automated special solutions. These were the keys to
our product strategy right from the start. We were also decisively
oriented toward the foreign market, in the conviction that
our highly specialised machines would meet with less competition
and a market more open to innovation. These turned out to
be the right choices, allowing the company to grow and giving
my husband the perfect opportunity to put his enterprising
skills to work: Giuseppe strongly believed in what he was
doing, and was never afraid to take risks. But the most important
factor that has allowed us to become what we are today is
that we always made lives have always focused around the family
business.
More than
40 years in the mechanical industry
“I
was only fifteen when I was hired by Fratelli Giana in February
1966,” begins Mrs. Giana, “and that was where
I met the man I would later marry, in 1972. He was only twentytwo
when we met. The company the four Giana brothers founded in
55 specialized in construction of small lathes and work on
contract. The four brothers worked hard and their company
continued to grow,all the important decisions together, and
Giuseppe always had a great spirit of sacrifice, with a longterm
vision and a healthy dose of ambition. This has meant that
we have shared both the good and the bad things in this adventure.
And then, it is important to recognise that over the years
we have gathered some excellent team-mates around us, highly
qualified and committed employees, who have shared with us
both the company’s successes and the responsibilities
involved in our major investments in property and advanced
technologies for design, production and company administration.
“Now the management of the company is gradually passing
into the hands of our son Giulio, who has worked alongside
his father in various roles in the company and rose to the
position of technical director very early on. Our company’s
mission is still the same: using and developing advanced technology
to promote the growth of Giuseppe Giana Spa”.
The
second generation comes onto the scene
Giulio Giana’s story is easily told: raised on bread
and machine tools, he got involved in his parents’ business
when just a boy and came to be fascinated with construction
early on in life. Today, after 10 years officially working
for the company during which he has gained vast experience
in production and marketing, Giulio Giana is now technical
director of the company. His sister Carolina also works for
the family business, helping her mother Carmen in administration
and sales. The company is currently facing several important
strategic and operative decisions which will determine its
future course. These are decisions concerning the product,
company organisation and production. The company’s large
pool of advanced machine tools is destined for work on contract
and construction of a number of components of its own machines.
Giuseppe Giana Spa makes grinders, boring machines, milling
machines and milling and planing machines, including Europe’s
biggest grinder for flat surfaces. Giulio Giana explains,
“”We are deciding whether to invest further in
advanced machine tools to increase the amount of work we do
internally on construction of our machines. This is above
all in view of our new goal for our product, which is focusing
on highly specialised multitasking lathes. “We are also
investing important sums in our assembly department, constructing
a new building and purchasing new machinery. We are focusing
in particular on developing design in the 3D environment for
use in preparation of proposals, and boosting our organisational
structure in response to the pressing need for highly qualified
personnel capable of interacting with our many foreign customers.
“We see the future as a machine which is a work of art,
in the sense that we will be building only a small number
of machines with an outstanding level of technology. Basically,
we will be continuing to apply the strategy for growth that
my father has been applying since he first set out in his
career, and in line with this we will be continuing to focus
more and more on international markets, “We are the
first in the world to use Ina Rue 100 linear roller guides,
with high rigidity and rolling over pre-loaded roller blocks,
for movement of the longitudinal Z axis,” notes Giulio
Giana. “This system allows us to achieve translation
speeds of 20,000 mm/min”. Like the longitudinal axis,
the X and Y axes also run along pre-loaded roller blocks.
If the machine also has a B axis, the piece can be worked
on five sides after being positioned only once, and the five
axes may be interpolated to make any kind of complex profile.
Positioning is very precise, ±0.01, and may be repeated
with an accuracy of ±0.005 mm. The extreme rigidity
of the machine’s both those we have traditionally served
such as the USA, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc. and emerging
markets such as China and India. There are no limits on the
foreign markets we may serve: we go wherever our technology
is needed. Our strategy abroad is privileging the biggest
companies, who buy our high quality specialised machine tools,
not only multitasking ones. The principal sectors we serve
are still the same: energy, the oil industry, and the aerospace
industry, but we will not neglect any other sector that needs
machine tools of the type we produce, that is, large scale
lathes, perforators and superfinishing machines. All these
machines have a teleservice feature, both for PLCs and NC,
guaranteeing the high quality of Giuseppe Giana Spa’s
technical assistance service”.
Multitasking
is already reality
Since
mid-2005 Giuseppe Giana has
already been selling the GGTronic
3000, its first multitasking machine.
This is the first model in a new line
of lathing and milling work centres
which will replace its current production
of large lathes.
The model GGTronic 3000, which is
designed to permit unmanned
operation, can work with cylinders
and complex parts with diameters
of up to 4000 mm and lengths of up
to 20,000 mm.
This range of high power lathing
and milling centres and was created
to respond to the heavy-duty
requirements of heavy precision
mechanical industry, in particular
for ships’ masts, windmill masts,
valves for oil pipelines, crankshafts,
rolling mill cylinders, large
drums for winches and so on.
Special attention is paid to machine
ergonomics, achieved through easy
bracketing, visibility of machine
tools during various stages in processing
and measurement at the
end of the process. structure, made
entirely out of cast iron, allows us to
assemble anti- vibration boring
bars for internal bores of more than
4,000 mm.
Tradition, working together and
enterprising spirit are, in the end,
the keys to the success of Giuseppe
Giana Spa.
The company has achieved this
success by keeping its feet firmly
on the ground and competing on
the market with products in the
vanguard of technology. And if, as
an Italian proverb goes, fine weather
is already apparent in the morning,
we can be quite sure the same
will apply to the next generation,
entrusted with making the next
great leap for a company that is
that is the pride and joy of the
Italian machine tools industry.
