Special bearings, fully made in Italy

Staking on the product innovation, on a shrewd resource management and on the upgrading of its machine fleet, CPM S.p.A. has succeeded in keeping its production in Italy and now it makes programmes for the future.

It is one of the company’s feathers in the cap, having managed to keep the production in Italy completely. A long-term choice that the management of CPM S.p.A. made in the troubled years of the world financial and economic crisis and that it is pursuing with determination. The company, with headquarters at Nova Milanese, in province of Monza and Brianza, is focused on the design and manufacturing of special bearings for numerous application ambits.

Thanks to the strategy pursued in the last decade and to a highly shrewd management of the company’s economic balance, today CPM approaches its customers as partner, with a dynamic attitude, making available a solid know-how gained in half century of activity. «Being always competitive is our great challenge – started Simone Fantin, Vice General Manager and Sales Manager of CPM –We want to be that in a complex, fragmented and rapidly evolving market, offering products with high quality-price ratio. We are constantly oriented towards innovation, through an attentive selection of raw materials and the use of advanced manufacturing technologies, to be able to grant the quality and the customizations demanded by the market».

Tailor-made products and services

CPM was founded in 1967 and today its core activity consists in the manufacturing in medium and big batches of highly customized special bearings, in a dimensional range from 10 to 800 millimetres of external diameter. Special ball, cylindrical roller, tapered roller and needle roller bearings find application in numerous industrial fields worldwide, from the automotive to robotics, from mechanical transmissions to textile, from renewable energy sources to agricultural and earth handling machines. Every year, in the factory at Nova Milanese (Milan, Italy), organized to manage in-house all manufacturing phases, according to the lean production principles, they produce over 3 million special bearings, slewing rings and u-joint bearings.

This approach represents an added-value that grants both the constant monitoring of the entire process quality and of each single component produced, and the necessary flexibility to manage the high customization requested. «Your needs…our actions is our business claim – specified Fantin – A concept that expresses our capability of supplying national and international customers collaborating with them, thanks to our technical office, since the early development phases of a new solution». Another highlight of CPM is its extreme flexibility: «A right decision today perhaps will be no longer valid within three years – adds Simone Fantin – Therefore, on one hand it is essential to rely on a long-term strategy, on the other hand we must be versatile to suit the changeable external market conditions».

Reference sectors and markets

About 65% of CPM production is intended for the Italian market, actually for manufacturers that export 70% of their technologies, while the remaining 35% is sold abroad, a percentage, the latter, that the Lombard company aims at rising.

«We foresee a transition biennium for 2016-2017. About 70% of our turnover is destined to the power transmission field – explained the Sales Manager – We are working to widen our reference outlets and to achieve new business opportunities.

We are betting, for instance, on the mini wind power, we address the manufacturers of 10, 20 and 30 KW generators, even if it is a field whose development will notably depend on governmental funding. Another sector on which we are focusing is the Oil&Gas, although it is currently affected by a crisis phase, owing to the oil price decrease. This is an ambit that we discovered between the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015: the samples we have supplied are waiting for their homologation. Besides, we have widened our range with the introduction of tapered roller and cross roller bearings».

In geographical terms, the company is trying its expansion by proposing its solutions in Asia, especially in China and India, two outlets with high expansion potential.

«We are carrying out some market surveys to understand how to approach these areas. Domestic Asian enterprises tend to outsource components locally but the difficulty resides in identifying companies that are not too attentive to price but hold instead quality in high esteem.

We pay attention to Indian and Chinese OEM selling in Europe and therefore obliged to comply with our reliability and safety standards and to certify their products to compete with the various European players».

In general, macroeconomic prospects for 2016 are of cautious optimism: «It will be a year of transition and uncertainty on a world scale – added the manager – South America is still in trouble, Asia has slowed down and Europe strives to grow. For 2017 we intend to consolidate what we are undertaking and in the course of the next 5 years we expect to rise the export to 50% of the turnover».

Quality and certifications

To grant a high competitiveness level, CPM has focused on the maintenance of a high constant quality level.

«Our products undergo strong mechanical stresses that can damage the operation of entire plants – explained the sales manager – Besides having the UNI EN ISO 9001:2008 and UNI EN ISO 14001:2015 certifications, we have made some investments to adopt modern SPC systems that allow us to monitor manufacturing processes constantly.

During all phases, our control laboratory monitors and analyses if each bearing complies with the geometrical characteristics and all applicative and technical reference standards».

In the course of 2015, CPM has also started the procedures to attain the UNI EN ISO/TS 16949 certification for the automotive industry: «More and more customers, and not only in the automotive field, ask to certify that all processes are under control, in order to grant qualitative and reliability constancy of the final product – ended Simone Fantin – For our company it is an important challenge that has involved human resources and has implied the purchase of new technologies to automate some testing phases. The process to attain the ISO/TS 16949 certification is expected to finish at the end of this year».