MODEX C-Suite Q&A: Andrea Pongolini, EVP of Sales, E80 Group, Inc.

Andrea Pongolini, EVP of Sales, E80 Group, Inc.

Q. What is your number one takeaway from Modex 2022?

Pongolini: Modex confirmed that food and beverage producers’ commitment to automation is unprecedented. To provide some context, E80 Group works predominantly in the CPG market and we’ve experienced a huge growth in the past two years. Chronic lack of labor, inflation and rising material costs are forcing our customers to use automation not only for simple repetitive tasks, but also as a key tool to maintaining their competitiveness in the marketplace.

All of our customers are now talking about full plant automation and integration, which has always been E80’s business proposition and strategy. The projects we’re asked to undertake are getting bigger and bigger. We left Atlanta confident that our strategy is correct and that we will have a huge growth opportunity in the years to come.

Q. What are the three key market trends from your perspective?

Pongolini: The first trend I see is total integration. As mentioned before, we’ve been asked to undertake larger and more complex projects. Our customers are finally starting to envision end-to-end automation in their plants and DCs. With these projects, the software becomes even more important than the hardware. The automated systems need to be flexible, integrated and digitally connected.

Next, the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a critical component of any integrated and automated system. All of our customers want to collect as much data as possible from their systems. This data is critical to managing and maintaining their systems, but customers primarily want to use it to gather strategic business information.

Finally, goods-to-person for each picking was the most shown solution at Modex. Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are playing an important role in this type of solution. We don’t play in this arena, but I believe that as AMRs become more flexible and efficient, we may be able to apply this type of technology to our systems.

Q. How is Elettric80 responding to these market trends?

Pongolini: We’ve been improving and standardizing our SM.I.LE80 software platform for several years now. The platform controls full automation of a production plant or distribution center, from inbound receipt of ingredients and packaging material to automatic trailer loading of finished goods. We believe our software platform offers maximum flexibility to our customers and it’s designed to integrate with all the major enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) and warehouse management systems (WMSs).

All our products come with the required hardware to collect all meaningful data, and our software records and tracks every movement. We are now building a “Smart IoT” platform to collect, process and analyze this data. Our customers will be able to gather the information and utilize it for better decision-making. Our R&D department has also been experimenting with and using several types of navigation technologies, and we’re currently studying new case-picking solutions for CPG distribution centers using large fleets of AMR-like vehicles.