The trip to Italy

One of the big factors in our decision was timing.  Every machine manufacturer was very busy.  Some companies had told us they waited 12 – 18 months for their machines.  We wanted to have something in place by late July.  Emmegi assured us we could have our machine by early June.Several weeks prior to the shipment we received a call from our sales rep. indicating that we needed to go to Italy to sign off on the machine.  This was never discussed in any of our meetings and was a compete surprise to us.  Chris (our shop manager) and I planned a last minute trip to go to Italy to see our machine in action.

We had been given copies of the CamPlus, Job and Drill software from Emmegi and we decided to try to program some of the parts from our first targeted job for the testing.  Chris in our shop had several extrusion shipped over to Italy so we could use these when we were there.

As we tried to program our parts for the test, we had many issues.  Phone calls back to Emmegi in New Jersey did not answer the questions we had.  Emails to Italy were also not very helpful.  At this point, I’m getting worried.  If you can’t program your parts, or if you are getting tons of errors and no one knows why, it scares the hell out of you.  We did manage to program several parts and sent these to Italy ahead of our trip.

We arrived in Italy and were schedule to go to Carpi first (this is where the main Emmegi plant is and their software division) and then to Piacenza where they manufactur the Planet machines.

The trip could not have gone better.  We spent an entire day with their software group and they answered all of our questions.  We were able to see all of the equipment they make and it was quite amazing.  We were able to visit some glass companies there and see what they do and how the utilize the Emmegi equipment.  But the best part is that we were able to see our machine manufacture our parts.  We even had them try some things on the fly to see how easy it would be to adjust the machine and there were no issues.  We signed off on the machine and they loaded it for shipment the next day.

I’d like to say after having been in this industry for over 25 years that it is refreshing to see a company exceed your expectations.  The trip to Italy was really amazing.  Everything was handled very professionally and all of our questions and concerns were answered easily.  Despite all of the people who told us it wasn’t possible, they produced our machine and shipped it right on time.  Any limitations we had found with the software were reallyu mis-understandings on our part.  A few of the bugs we did find were corrected the same day and our machine was updated prior to shipment.  Most of those revolved around the metric to english units.  Some parts of the software were still displaying dimensions in metric.  These small things were corrected and the machine performed perfectly.