Since the beginning of my journey at COPAL SRL, I immediately started to realize that my most reliable partners, mills, were at the same time my most fierce enemies. Beginning with the 2008 financial crises, the steel industry became more and more competitive and overloaded with overcapacity, thus squeezing margins of the entire cluster. Mills started to fina a way out by buying out smaller and struggling SSCs (especially in the Italian Market), and so getting closer and more present to medium-small end users and steel merchants. This transition process is still in place and is consolidating year by year, putting medium-small SSC on the edge of a life time decision: selling to the big fishes or reinventing a new model of SSC? Well, for the sadness of the mills, we are trying to reinvent ourselves. In first place we developed a fully integrated ERP system that we named "BLACK DRAGON", capable of giving us data related to the entire company process (from order acquisitions to logistics data). In this way, we are able to assist our sales force and customers in the best way possible, competing with big and sophisticated mills ERP. In few words, we are way faster in analyzing data and in the decision making process. Second of all, we widened our client portfolio by serving also the more demanding customers with lower yearly steel consuption capacity. Sure, we had to sattle for a lost in the productivity performance, but we entered in a market that will never be feasible and appealing for mills or integrated SSC.
Being ready to change and adapt to new ventures made us today enough open minded to face any challange.
Gianmarco Clementoni
GM COPAL SRL
