One habit tells you more about Andrea Schenatti than any description could: he gets to the office very early, while everything is still quiet, and spends the first minutes of the day on the most delicate tasks, the ones that, as he puts it, “need a bit more peace and quiet to get done.” From nine o’clock on, the day turns into what he calls “a hundred percent hectic,” a steady stream of phone calls, emails and colleagues.
Schenatti has headed Mozzanica’s industrial Technical Department for almost ten years, and every day he balances two jobs within a single role.
Two jobs in one
He leads the industrial Technical Department and at the same time serves as Project Manager on individual projects: “It’s two jobs,” he admits, “and sometimes it’s hard to make them fit together.” When project management takes over, there is less time left for running the department, yet it is in this very dual role that the real value of his position becomes clear. Schenatti oversees every stage of a project, from the kickoff meeting through to acceptance testing, balancing the technical side, the part he loves most, and the direct relationship with the client.
The first face the client meets
The Technical Department steps in once Sales has done its part: when the order comes in, the project passes to Schenatti, who visits the client in person after the kickoff meeting. From then on, he is the client’s go-to person for every aspect of the job, supported on site by the Site Supervisors who handle day-to-day operations. The role calls for technical expertise, but also for the ability to reassure people. His approach has changed over the years and become “much more measured,” a far cry from the frankness that used to come out a little too easily. The result is a relationship that lasts: he might go back to a client after ten years and be greeted with “Ah, Schenatti!” It’s nice, he says, “because it means they remember you fondly.”
Twenty-five years in a changing profession
With more than twenty-five years in the industry, Schenatti has watched the way people work transform. He started out when information arrived by fax, “a day or two late,” and three people shared one desk and a single phone. Today the flow never stops and, he admits, it can be overstimulating: emails, messages and clients who want everything faster and faster. Technology does help, though. In June the company introduced software for communication between the job site and the Technical Department, “a tool that’s really helping us out,” and Mozzanica has already started looking at artificial intelligence with the IT manager and the senior management team. “It’s important to be ready to understand it now,” he says, “rather than saying ‘we’ll see next year.’”
A large company that still feels close-knit
What Schenatti can guarantee the client is rooted in the company behind him: almost forty years of experience, exceptional growth over the last fifteen and a Technical Department where senior staff pass on their knowledge to younger colleagues. When he comes up against a regulation he needs to get to grips with, he brings in two or three colleagues and turns the question into a chance to study it together: “We think it through as a group, and we all come out of it having grown professionally.” The added value, he says, lies in having more than a hundred people and an atmosphere where “when there’s a problem, you have more than one person you can ask.” It is a large company that has managed to preserve the quality of its communication and of the relationships between its people.
When tight deadlines become a success story
The example he chooses is a project from last year: a food manufacturer building a new production plant, which realized only well into construction that it needed substantial fire protection systems. Between May and July, Mozzanica completed the engineering and procured the materials, then started work on site at the end of July, right before the summer holidays. This was no warehouse with the same layout repeated throughout; it was a production plant with a wide variety of very different systems, each designed to its own set of rules. The job took a year, and final acceptance testing is scheduled for next week. For Schenatti, it is the perfect example of what it means to see a major project through.
That ability to move between the drawing board and the job site, and between technical work and people, reflects the way Mozzanica works: expertise that gets passed on and reliability that builds lasting relationships.