New Aerodinamica has celebrated 40 years of activity, a great achievement for a small family-run company, composed of a very close-knit and united team, capable of exporting 35% of its technologies worldwide and increasingly a point of reference for the packaging market. Wherever there is a trim to be removed, New Aerodinamica is present and does it with advanced and completely customized technological solutions based on customer requests. We talk about it in this article with CEO Paolo Radaelli and in the video contribution with the entire company team
It was January 3, 1984 when Angelo Radaelli, originally from Bergamo but already resident in Switzerland for some years for study and work reasons, decided to return to Italy and founded New Aerodinamica. The experience gained as a sales manager for a French company in the sector that operated in printing and converting, together with an economic boom that in those years was starting to spread also in Italy, convinced Angelo and a partner to start a company, which already in the name, suggested how innovation and a certain propensity to explore new horizons, would characterize the company’s operations.
The production machines at that time, although not even remotely comparable to those available today, began to require the need to adopt systems capable of removing dust and trimmings from production waste, especially in the paper mills, box factories, corrugated cardboard production sector, which are still today the sectors where New Aerodinamica boasts a world leadership, with cutting-edge technological solutions. Although paper is considered the core business, especially with the arrival in the company in 1997 of Paolo Radaelli, son of Angelo, the company’s presence has also grown in the flexible packaging sector, from plastic films to aluminum, from the simplest to laminated films, and today New Aerodinamica presents itself as a global partner for all sectors of packaging printing and converting.
In 1997 the first turning point and international growth
“I thank my father Angelo, who allowed me to join the company in 1997, with him I was able to delve into every area of the company’s activities, both from a technical and commercial and administrative point of view”, tells us Paolo who today manages as CEO a team of 7 people who represent the heart and soul of this small but dynamic Italian industrial reality capable of achieving success all over the world and serving small family business but also multinational companies.
“When I joined New Aerodinamica, we began our growth on international markets with the first installations in Europe and subsequently, through the grapevine, we expanded our range of action so much that today, despite not having a foreign sales network, we have installed systems in every part of the world”, says Paolo, who in fact does not have a global sales organization, but works on word of mouth and on the requests that continue to arrive from the market.
The contact mainly occurs with printing and converting companies, although New Aerodinamica is occasionally directly involved by the various manufacturers of production technologies, who have perhaps been able to verify how their machines manage to achieve significant production performance, thanks to these industrial waste management systems, and very often suggest it to their end customer.
The heart of the company is all Italian: design, carried on by 4 people and one of whom is Paolo, is developed entirely internally, while the construction of the systems, from mechanics to electronics, takes place in 3 partner workshops of New Aerodinamica. This business model has proven to be successful and allows the company to always offer the best in every area, while also keeping costs under control.
The other half of the company is entirely female, with a team of 4 colleagues who take care of all the bureaucratic and administrative management and those related to the organization of construction sites at customers’ premises.
Since Covid, exponential growth for the cardboard sector and new procedures based on remote assistance and data management
Until 2020, New Aerodinamica operated equally between the plastic, aluminum, paper and cardboard sectors. But with Covid, thanks to the explosion of corrugated cardboard and tissue packaging market, with food delivery and the boom in e-commerce, the cardboard sector literally exploded, and New Aerodinamica found itself increasingly involved with requests from all over the world.
“We had never thought about the remote assistance service for our systems, also because we were convinced that it was not a primary need and, when necessary, we were flexible and timely enough in intervening in every part of the world. In that period, however, we found ourselves forced to install and start systems from our offices in Casazza, and at that point we decided to change the way we operated, implementing each system as standard with the basic software for remote control”, adds Paolo Radaelli.
Today, with the extraordinary importance that data, its collection and analysis have assumed, New Aerodinamica, in addition to managing any type of need from its own headquarters, has also started a process of improvement and development of its machines, starting from the analysis of production performance, finally also receiving customer feedback at each new installation, to take advantage of their advice for continuous improvement of the products.
Furthermore, the old systems were turned on and off independently from the production machine on which they were installed, with the risk of being turned on Monday and turned off on Friday. Now, however, the system is connected synchronously to the production machine, and after a few minutes of machine downtime, it goes into stand-by automatically, thus also allowing for significant energy savings.
The dust extraction systems are equipped with special filters for the recovery of filtered hot air that is reintroduced into the production environments, heating them and therefore allowing for savings in energy costs: this feature is highly appreciated especially in Northern European countries.
“We know that now we will have to start studying Artificial Intelligence, I still can’t say what use it will be in our work, but also thanks to our partners, I am sure that sooner or later something will happen in that field too”, adds Paolo, always looking for innovations to improve company’s technologies.
New Aerodinamica, always going against the grain with innovative design choices
One of the distinctive characteristics of New Aerodinamica has always been that of not following the fashions of the moment, but rather always seeking cutting-edge, non-standardized solutions, with which to serve customers in the best way and in all their needs. “Today we have reached a very high-quality standard, all our systems are specifically oversized in their components compared to real needs, and this is essential to always guarantee correct operation, reduce breakdowns and machine downtime, and reduce consumption. Our machines run more slowly, make less noise, wear less and last longer. Far-sighted customers who accept our philosophy, choose us and appreciate us beyond the cost of the investment which may be higher, at least initially, but which in the long run also pays off in terms of return on investment, and our solutions also respond to sustainability needs”, Paolo tells us proudly.
Furthermore, thanks to this feature, each New Aerodinamica system is already naturally set up to be expanded in the future, without necessarily requiring the replacement of the entire system.
“I remember with pleasure the installation of a trim suction system on a corrugator that produces at around 400 meters per minute at an Austrian customer, with a distance between the corrugator and the press where we would convey the waste, of around 250/280 meters. In the contract, the customer had included a series of clauses and penalties that would have discouraged anyone with common sense, but since I love challenges, I gladly accepted it, knowing that we would obtain an excellent result, and so it was”, says Paolo.
Thanks to technological development, what was once considered little more than a tube and fan, is now in reality an advanced and increasingly strategic system, which through digitalization is integrated into the production process of printing and converting machines, but also within an entire business management workflow. New Aerodinamica is therefore ready, as is in its DNA, to take on the new challenges of the packaging sector, to continue its path of growth in market shares, but always remaining a family-run, close-knit and streamlined reality.
