Interview with Augusto Bianchini, CEO of Turtle
June 30, 2022
Interview with Augusto Bianchini, CEO of Turtle, the startup that offers the first management software to measure the environmental, social and economic sustainability of companies.
We live in an age where, thanks to sustainability, companies can generate value in a long-term perspective. Conducting your business in a sustainable way means efficiently and strategically managing the available resources, whether they are natural, financial, human or relational. To ensure optimal management of resources, first of all, it is necessary to quantify them, with a set of indicators’ guide about the transition to sustainability. In this way, value is generated for the company and it is possible to effectively contribute to the growth, improvement and socio-economic development of the communities in which the company operates, measuring its impacts. If you want to measure and improve the level of sustainability of your company, from today you have an additional ally at your side: it’s Turtle!
What’s about Turtle
Turtle is the startup that will help your company to systematically monitor the level of sustainability and to implement a process of improvement of processes, products and commercial activities towards his paradigm. The team consists of engineers specialized in the industrial sector who will be at your side to design, implement and measure the best solutions, in order to optimize the environmental, economic and social impacts of your company.
All this will be possible through ViVACE (become the first sustainability management software) an innovative visualization tool that allows you to quantify resource flows in different business scenarios, making new opportunities immediately visible and providing data for the calculation of sustainability KPIs (environmental, economic and social).
If you want to know more, we interviewed Augusto Bianchini, CEO of Turtle.
Hi Augusto, it’s a pleasure to meet you and thank you for your time. Tell us more about Turtle.
Thank you for your interest in Turtle.
When and how did Turtle’s idea come about?
Turtle is the result of the evolution of a winning model of collaboration between University and Company, experimented for the first time in a research and training laboratory (Tailor), born in 2017 and inaugurated in 2019, in which multi-skills disciplines in the field of engineering, and in particular automation and digitalization, have been integrated and made available to the territory, to meet the specific needs of companies of all sizes. Among the most urgent needs currently felt by the industrial context, there is the transition to sustainability and among the main barriers that we have identified in the implementation of this step is the lack of information that can guide the company management. In this context, digitalization and automation are a fundamental tool to bridge the existing gap and give the necessary support to companies in identifying paths and solutions that are truly sustainable in relation to their processes and products. From here comes Turtle, a start-up signed in 2021, which offers the first management software, called lively, (Visualization of Value to Assess Circular Economy), to quantify the sustainability of companies, highlight the strengths and weaknesses and identify ways to improve the positive impact of the production process.
How did you launch your company? Did you use crowdfunding campaigns?
For the moment we started focusing on our forces, those of 4 members all belonging to the University of Bologna, also part and promoter of the team, and a dozen young collaborators who are specializing in these disciplines, also determining the profile of a new professional figure based on the redefinition and management of products and processes with a view to sustainability. Given the importance and attention of companies to this issue, and their determination and readiness to implement improvement projects, the requests we have received for software and to outline a transition path are already numerous. Our initial idea is to download the skills acquired by the team in the last 7-8 years by creating a network of collaborations, starting from renowned consulting companies, able to spread our software and our approach, so as to reach all the companies wishing to implement the transition to sustainability in a conscious and systematized. A reality that we like to distinguish, not by size, but in slow and fast companies, fast in responding to increasingly challenging needs through sustainable innovations.
How does the ViVACE model work?
The ViVACE model is by choice very simple because it must be immediate to understand the concept of sustainability, still too smokey for some companies, and the effect of some improvement solutions. Starting from the data that companies already have at/or through the integration of additional instrumentation to acquire them, ViVACE model quantifies a series of performance indicators, the famous KPIs, able to guide entrepreneurial choices. These indicators, aggregated at the pyramid level, cover four key categories for each of the pillars of sustainability: for the environmental part, it is energy, water, waste and transport; for the social part, governance is covered, workers, suppliers and customers, and finally for the economic part we talk about margins, sustainable assets, profitability of investments and leverage. This set of indicators, expandable towards the operational level according to the needs of product and process management, are aggregated towards the strategic level up to obtain a score of corporate sustainability with which to confront internal and external targets. Such data, information and KPIs systematized in ViVACE, also support the pre-compilation of certifications and sustainability assessment systems.
What are Turtle’s main services?
Turtle mainly offers two services. One that we can call “innovation service” that allows us to identify the path, the strategy of transition to sustainability, which basically involves 3 steps: an analysis of the data and information available, the installation and mass point of the ViVACE software and its KPIs, identifying sustainable innovations and supporting their development. The second service is that of training on the concepts and approach of the ViVACE model in order to transfer skills. This way sustainability becomes a daily practice in companies as a guiding concept in the management and conduct of the strategy and of operations.
What are your plans for the future?
As the theme of sustainability is dynamic, so will necessarily be the same for ViVACE software, which will then be continuously developed and updated to align with business needs; from which the vocation and entrepreneurial idea of Turtle starts. The software will still be the starting point and the aid tool, but the transition to sustainability requires the implementation of innovative solutions to continuously improve the processes and products of companies and supply chain logistics-production. This requires the integration of new skills also different from each other, which we hope to include in the team, to give continuity to the paths initiated in companies through the development of ad hoc solutions that belong to different disciplines.
Curiosity: Would you like to tell us about the final choice of the name?
Ah, into name we wanted to say many things and enclose our history. Turtle stands for “Technology, aUtomation and smaRt daTa for peopLE” that describes well the tools we use to support sustainability, as technology, automation and intelligent data, and then information and indicators. Sustainability that is outlined for and in people in order to ensure their focal objective, namely to preserve future generations. The resulting acronym, of which we do not care so much about the meaning linked to the English word, allowed us instead to make a parallel to Tailor, in terms of words and number of letters, to remember precisely the path taken in recent years. Twisted? We’re still engineers and if there’s not a bit of complexity, like Turtle’s challenge itself, we’re not entirely happy!
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