Advanced fastening systems Agrati

ADVANCED FASTENING SYSTEMS

From humble origins more than 50 years ago Agrati has become one of the global leaders in the production of fastening systems for the automotive industry. Eugenia Fiusco reports.

IT was 1939 when Agrati was set up as a small mechanical engineering company. It employed around 20 people who manufactured woodscrews, articles for carpenters and rod linkages. At the time, the equipment available was modest and manually handled. Technological development and physical expansion went hand in hand as Agrati gradually but steadily set up new facilities and created strategic alliances with other companies. In particular, in 1959, a company called URAMA SIMMONDS was founded by Agrati and Simmonds, a leading French company in the production of self-locking ring nuts and, in 1974, ATTREZZERIE ADDA was set up with the purpose of concentrating the know-how and production in one site. The early 1990s saw the first stage of integrating the companies at group level. Raw materials purchasing and production, heat treatments and surface treatments were centralised and Agrati acquired 100 per cent of FIVIT.

The new millennium saw the start of a radical transformation of the Agrati Group. The main turning point in the company’s development was in 2001, when the group decided to put together all of the companies it controlled under the same name and present itself to customers in a more focused and centralised way. That turned out to be a winning strategy. In the past ten years, Agrati’s yearly turnover has in fact more than doubled.

A worldwide presence

Today, Agrati has five subsidiaries and 1700 employees in ten manufacturing units, over 200,000 square metres of surface area, and a capacity of 150,000 tonnes per year. Beside the headquarters in Veduggio, located approximately 30 kilometres from Milan, the group has many locations in the north of Italy, and four branches in France, beside the commercial offices in Créteil. In Germany, Agrati has four facilities.

Agrati has also followed through on its investment plans in China and the USA. In 2007, Yantai Agrati Fasteners (YAF) was established in Yantai, in the region of Shandong, China. Today, YAF is one the most important fastening system producers in the country, with a surface area of 87,000 square metres and a capacity of 8500 tonnes per year. All production stages of YAF are performed locally. The company has two other offices in China, in Shanghai and Changchun.

In the USA, Agrati Group made a global alliance with the American company Semblex Corporation, a fastener manufacturer and engineering resource located in Elmhurst, Illinois, to provide fastener solutions and coldformed special products for top OEMs and components suppliers with global locations. The alliance had the objective to combine two supplier teams in order to provide global customers with a single source for technical, quality and logistics support. Local engineering support, local quality response and local sales support to purchasing, as well as inventory, material planning and other logistics support are supplied to customer plants in Europe, North America and Asia.

LaBridoire moves to new €2.8 million location

Agrati La Bridoire has started building a 3535 square metres packaging, storage and shipping centre for the value of €2.8 million. La Bridoire produces sheet metal screws, metric screws, screws for plastics and Trilobular thread forming screws. The plant’s manufacturing processes include cold heading, screw threading, heat treatment lines, plating lines, sorting and metal weaving. The French site will be the new logistics centre. The Italian group is planning to relocate the La Bridoire plant to a more convenient location near the motorway. The new logistics centre is expected to be ready by 2019, the year that proudly witnesses a hundred years of business for Agrati.

Commitment to Research and Development

Investing in strategic acquisitions and new facilities are not the only strong suits of the Italian group. There are several other reasons explaining its success. It is important to underline the company’s ability to focus investments in the right sector at the right moment. This has proven to be crucial, along with the management’s will to invest in continuous technological improvements to the group’s production facilities.

Moreover, investments in quality control standards and procedures are constant. Quality plays a major role in production cycles and involves several quality checks on the supply and production cycles. Particularly important is spotting any possible defect during primary stages. n