Elmann: A Mould Supplier and More!

By Franco Marcori

Elmann is headquartered in Casale sul Sile, Treviso, in northeastern Italy. I had known the company many years ago as a benchmark mould supplier for vehicle lighting, and was eager to see the evolution. I was welcomed by plant manager Katia Pasquali and sales manager Monica Fanton, who guided me on a tour of the facility.

During the tour, I saw where steel, plastics, and electronics share operators and equipment. Research and innovation activities were exploring interconnected areas with development in overmoulding of three-dimensional functionalized films with conductive tracks and the addition of electronic components; polyurethane overmoulding onto plastic parts to create aesthetic finishes, and study of moulding microöptics and textures with different aesthetic effects obtained through micro-machining with femtosecond lasers on Elmann’s modular prototype tools.

Seeing screen printing and electronic pick-and-place machines alongside moulds for thermoforming functionalized films and injection machines for moulding microstructures in soft materials, I felt like I was in a research and pre-development centre rather than a facility geared toward equipment manufacturing. This feeling was further confirmed at the end of the plant visit by President Almerino Canuto, who explained me Elmann’s evolution.

Almerino Canuto has always focused not on products but on processes. This has allowed him over time to carry out R&D projects with an innovative approach to organization. From the toolshop, he developed and sold several spinoffs going concerns; these include FCS System, leaders in the development of modular systems and automation concepts for workpiece handling that have now become a standard.

From advanced mouldmaker offering co-design, the company are moving towards an evolving co-engineering approach to support product development where style and equipment simultaneously share expertise – starting from the compatibility of material and component technical process windows to be used in composite solutions and pursue process synthesis. This is taking shape as a ‘short supply chain’ laboratory, a competence centre capable of bringing as many activities as possible into the co-moulding tooling cycle within a single technological framework.

In 2022, this evolutionary path was shared with Paul di Giovanni He’s the founder and owner of Integrity, a company with plants in Canada, USA, and Mexico. The synergy stems from mutual respect and a long-standing friendship between Almerino Canuto and Paul Di Giovanni, with the shared goal of establishing a competence centre within the group, striving in ongoing initiatives such as the Academy and the Virtual Coach to track a forecast of an industrial project based on a need-anticipation model. With his knowledge of processes and an awareness of the interrelationships between material properties and their processability, Canuto implemented a scientific approach within Elmann through a testing method based on DoE (design of experiments). The data obtained through the algorithms is stored in databases. This internally-developed IT ecosystem is called E-DWS. It contains its own mathematical engine, under development for years now with Elmann’s R&D projects.

The E-DWS platform, used as a virtual coach, allows all stakeholders to work on the same data in real time along development into a shared method-driven process.

In a fragmented supply chain, Elmann position themselves as a laboratory and competence centre capable of combining expertise and in-house equipment to synthesize processes. Product development, styling, and equipment work simultaneously, starting from material and components compatibility and arriving at composite solutions. Once the 3D model is validated, the product is ready for industrialization; the equipment has been developed and verified first virtually and then in the laboratory, enabling production in automated cells, reducing post-processing and facilitating sustainability.