Interview with Luca Sorgiacomo, ProgressLab CEO
December 29, 2021
Interview with Luca Sorgiacomo, ProgressLab CEO a company that takes care of digitization services for manufacturing companies
Information Digitization in an enterprise can be a very useful and in many cases a necessary tool for time and resources optimization. Collecting data and information in the “old-fashioned way” in fact means getting lost in often messy paper archives , often located outside our place of work. All this results in a constant loss of time and therefore money. ProgressLab, Within Industry 4.0, aims to improve business life by offering digitization solutions for businesses. How? Through Progress, a platform that allows you to digitize and manage the data collection processes, planning and monitoring of works. The platform shows employees the tasks assigned, keeping track of the progress of work and production costs and can be 100% integrated with other business applications (ERP, PDM, WMS etc).
What can you do with Progress
- Digitize documents by centralizing the management of procedures and providing operators with interactive work instructions with images, PDFs and videos, fillable checklists and forms.
- Monitor jobs in real time and from anywhere: at a glance you will have access to graphs showing the progress of jobs and the workload of operators; you will no longer have to rely on complex processing for estimating time and costs; keep under control the actual margin of products and deviations from estimates
- Maintain traceability: with a simple click you can access the history of the work done by your operators; collect data automatically without the need for paper records; find information in a simple and organized way; create personalized reports
If you want to know more about the digitization services offered by ProgressLab, read the interview with Luca Sorgiacomo, CEO of the company
Hello Luca, nice to meet you and thank you for the time you are dedicating to us. Tell us more about ProgressLab
Progress Lab was born to democratize access to Industry 4.0 technologies. There is so much talk of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but it’s no revolution if only a few are taking part it. Thus we propose ourselves to companies not only to introduce production management software, but in general as a one stop shop to make the leap to the Industry 4.0 paradigm. This requires 360 degree knowledge of business processes and a very high focus on people, starting from the production planner, to the factory operator, to the IT manager and all the other stakeholders we deal with. Because you cannot transform processes without the input of all those involved.
When and how was the ProgressLab born?
Before founding Progress Lab I worked for a local manufacturing company with less than 10 million turnover, I was there with a mandate to help them structure and grow in an orderly manner.
One of the two divisions produced electronic boards for third parties and at any given time could have up to 200 open orders to plan and monitor, each with its own process and specifications. Production was managed by eyesight, with the obvious risks and problems. The first step was to make at least one excel sheet, but the need to go further came soon. So they asked me to design a concept for a software that could monitor production and manage the quality aspects of the orders. The management liked the idea, but it required investments that for them were not justified compared to other priorities.
Over the next two years I continued to think about it and refine the concept. I had no technical skills to develop it on my own so it was just a personal passion. However, when I talked about it with professionals, the feedback was often positive. I’m not going to go into details, but I came to a point on a personal level that prompted me to look for a change: the right time had come to try the adventure, so I left the company to start the project.
How long did it take to shape the project?
As I said, at least a couple of years passed before I dedicated myself full-time to the project. The story then becomes interesting. I wasn’t a developer. In December 2018, while still working as an employee, I spoke with an acquaintance, a professional programmer, who showed interest in the project. Only then the idea became, in my mind, a true opportunity. Unfortunately for personal reasons in the end he could not participate in the project, but I had already decided to leave the company I worked for. I had wanted to learn how to program for years, so I decided that I would study and create the product myself. I had some money on my side, and my wife and I thought we could do it. So in June 2019 I quit my job: I devoted the first 5-6 months to studying and doing experiments, then I started the actual development of the platform. It took at least another six months to get to a presentable prototype, and I began the procedures for registering the company, which was founded in the summer of 2020.
How are companies responding?
Production processes are critical for companies and relying on a supplier to digitize them requires very high levels of trust. The lack of references and existing success stories was a huge and understandable barrier, despite the feedback on the platform which, at first sight, was always positive. I had to work as an external consultant to a company for several months before gaining this trust, we are now planning the first pilot in early 2022.
We have been talking about digitization for a long time now, what’s the situation in Italy ?
Still far behind. But the problem is not technology, it is a set of two factors. The first is a poor understanding of the value of data. People struggle to perceive the potential of something they don’t see and don’t touch and generally don’t know how to approach. In an industrial context where a large proportion of companies are still relatively small and without dedicated professionals who know how to lead this kind of project, other priorities tend to take over.
The second is a problem of approach: the technologies are there and in large quantities, but they are all quite complex and impossible to fully understand at the selection stage. Thus the client, once the partner has been chosen, must rely almost blindly on him to define the implementation strategy. To successfully digitize a process, you need interventions that are not only technological, but also organizational. If the supplier is not strong on the change management side, or if the organization itself does not lend itself to make the necessary changes, there is a very high risk of not achieving the result, as demonstrated by research in the field (McKinsey in 2018, he published a report in which “Only 16% of the participants said that their digital transformation has successfully increased the performance and equipped to support the change in the long term”)
How did you launch your project? Have you used crowdfunding campaigns?
No. Progress Lab started off quietly, thanks to personal and close relatives’ savings. This was wanted, for personal reasons. We have not sought external funding so far, but it is not excluded that we will do so after collecting the first successful cases, to accelerate growth.
Do you also use Progress to digitize your company?
We are not a manufacturing company, we make software, so it does not apply to our context.
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