Zeno: production efficiency and energy sustainability without silos

The context

Zeno S.r.l. was founded in 1969 in the province of Verona and produces gaskets and industrial technical parts, with plastic injection moulding and pantograph milling of plastic and aluminium items. The company runs an extremely diverse product portfolio under the motto "technology in the service of excellence", and invests in advanced solutions to improve efficiency, sustainability and quality.

When a machine fleet is modernised, each system generates information through proprietary protocols that do not talk to each other, and information silos appear. That fragmentation, a side effect of the technological path management had set out on, was the problem to solve. Already heavily digitised, with Industry 4.0 machinery and an advanced Zucchetti ERP, Zeno's priority was centralising data to get a complete, current picture of production processes, energy consumption and product costs. Management also wanted to check for bottlenecks or hidden inefficiencies, to avoid slowdowns in production cycles.

The project

Zeno chose IDA as its unified system for process control and for the 5.0 transition. A decision resting on three pillars: consistency with the digital path already underway, trust in Maxfone's technical team and speed of implementation. IDA collected, normalised and interpreted data from the different machines, tuning the KPIs to the company's real needs: setup time analysis, productivity per item, real-time OEE calculation. Order and item information was integrated too, enabling traceability on long and complex production runs. In parallel, Maxfone supported the company in strengthening the industrial Wi-Fi network needed to guarantee coverage across all its buildings.

The results

Zeno turned its management control from reactive to predictive, moving beyond the operator-feedback model. The company analyses machine performance in real time, identifies setup and idle times and understands where investment is genuinely needed, avoiding unnecessary spend. Management's hunch about possible over-capacity proved correct: the problem was not production capacity but how work was organised. The groundwork was also laid for future sustainability reporting, anticipating the environmental data regulation requires and building a competitive advantage with customers increasingly focused on ESG.

What comes next

The company is completing the integration of its solar plant, with connected inverters and certified MID sensors, to monitor self-consumption in real time and prevent invisible plant stoppages. Next come precise CO₂eq calculation per batch and item, and real production costing, cross-referencing energy consumption, materials and labour hours. The direction is clear: build a data system and a data-driven approach that position the company as a reference point in industrial innovation.