Alessandro Luciani · Personal site
If a problem isn't visible, it doesn't get fixed.
I spent thirty years in industry: the assembly line, quality, product development, technical service, supply chain. AndonLab is the name I give to the way I learned to tackle problems — bring them into the open, then fix them at the root. This page is about how.
Andon — the signal that stops the line
Why this symbol
A stylised Japanese andon lantern, drawn over a gear construction plate taken from an old applied mechanics course. The light is what makes the problem visible; the drawing is what lets you fix it. On its own, neither has ever been enough.
The real problem
The most expensive inefficiencies are the ones nobody sees.
Not the dramatic machine breakdowns. The things an organisation has stopped noticing, because "we've always done it this way". They cost money every day and appear in no report. In thirty years I've met them all, and almost always in the same shape.
Recurring anomalies
The same defect comes back every quarter. Each time it gets patched, nobody closes out the root cause. The cost lands on warranty and on the customer.
Scattered information
The fix for a failure already exists: it's in an email, in a file on someone's desktop, in the head of a technician about to retire. Nobody can find it.
Manual processes dressed up as digital
Spreadsheets passed from hand to hand, double entries, data reconciled once a month. The system is there, but the real work happens outside it.
Reactive quality
The problem surfaces when the customer complains. Quality becomes a department that chases, instead of a function that anticipates.
Digital tools nobody uses
Software designed by people who have never seen an assembly line, a test bench or a service workshop. Expensive, comprehensive and deserted.
Decisions without data
Priorities set in a meeting, on the basis of who speaks loudest. The data exists, but it never reaches the table where the decision is made.
On a production line, when something goes wrong, the Andon lights up. In most organisations that signal doesn't exist — or it exists and nobody looks at it.
What AndonLab is
Not a company. It's the way I approach things.
AndonLab is the name I've given to my professional philosophy — and to this space, where I write down what I've learned and what I'm building. Two words, two halves of the same job: bring the problem into the light, then build the answer.
AndonThe signal that stops the line
In Lean Production the Andon is the device that makes an anomaly immediately visible. But above all it is a cultural choice: giving the people who work on the product the power — and the responsibility — to stop the process when quality, safety or compliance are at risk.
Don't hide the anomaly. Bring it into the light. Act straight away. And fix the cause, not the symptom. A company that switches the Andon on stops for an hour; a company that switches it off pays for years.
LabThe workshop where things get built
Seeing the problem isn't enough. You need somewhere to build the answer and test it in the field: that's the lab. Here industrial experience, first-hand observation of processes, data and digital tools combine into concrete, testable solutions.
No universal frameworks, no platforms that take six months to configure. Things you can put in someone's hands on Monday morning and measure on Friday.
Identify what slows things down, creates waste or compromises quality. Then turn experience into organisational and digital solutions that can actually be applied.
01 — Signal
The problem becomes visible
Anomalies, complaints, recurrences, lost time: brought into the light and put on a table.
02 — Analysis
Look for the cause, not the culprit
Data, the real process, conversations on the shop floor. Separating the recurring symptom from the root cause.
03 — Solution
Organisational, digital or both
A redesigned process, a tool, or the one that makes the other sustainable.
04 — Improvement
Measured and made to stick
An indicator agreed before starting. If it doesn't improve, it isn't finished.
My path
Thirty years inside the factory, not around it.
Alessandro Luciani
Turin, Italy
- Experience30 years
- EducationMechanical Eng.
La Sapienza, 1995 - SectorsCommercial vehicles
Agricultural machinery - FunctionsOperations · Quality
R&D · Service - LanguagesIT · EN · ES · FR
I spent thirty years in the places where industrial problems actually start: the assembly line, the test bench, the service workshop, the meeting where you decide whether a product is ready for the customer.
I started on the shop floor, not in a meeting room
I began in 1997 at Iveco in Suzzara, on the Daily assembly line: line supervisor, then workshop quality, then product quality. In December 2000 I moved to Valladolid, in Spain, as Plant Quality Manager and head of the welding shop: more than four years of total immersion in a plant and in an industrial culture different from my own.
Those are the years that shaped everything else. Someone who has watched a line stop from close up looks at a problem differently from someone who reads about it in a report.
Then the responsibility grew, the craft stayed the same
Over some eighteen years in the Iveco / CNH Industrial group I led product quality for the Eurocargo range, for the Defence and Firefighting vehicles between Bolzano and Ulm, and for the entire Bus Product Line out of Lyon. At Irisbus I ran the Customer Satisfaction & Quality department of a European business: five plants, a hundred and seventy people across Europe.
From 2015 to March 2026 at SDF — Same Deutz-Fahr, a family group that designs and builds agricultural machinery. I joined in the Quality function and over the years moved through roles of growing responsibility, up to Chief Operating Officer, board member of SDF SpA and co-CEO of SDF Italia SpA.
An international and complex manufacturing environment, where I worked on the governance of R&D and of industrial and operational processes, in close contact with the top of the company and with cross-functional teams.
And a startup, actually run
In 2025 I took over as General Manager of Vitibot SA in Reims, France: a leading company in full-electric autonomous vineyard robots, part-owned by SDF. A small, technologically advanced business with all the typical problems of a scale-up — very different from a structured group, and instructive for that reason.
People, before anything else
Of everything I've done in these years, the part I gave the most attention to was growing the people who worked with me: building responsibility and competence inside the teams, not around myself. It's also the only part that lasts once the manager is gone.
What's left, in practice
The ability to connect four things that in most organisations stay separate: the problem in the field, the process that generates it, the data that describes it and the management decision that either solves it or postpones it.
And the conviction that industrial results show up in the indicators, not in intentions. An improvement that isn't measured isn't an improvement: it's an opinion.
The results achieved over these years were collective results, obtained with the teams I led: no industrial indicator moves thanks to one person alone. The specific figures belong to the companies I worked for and stay with them; I'm happy to talk about it in person, within the limits of what I can say.
How I work
Four steps. Always the same ones.
It isn't a proprietary methodology with an acronym. It's how problems get solved when someone then has to answer for them.
Look at the problem where it happens
In the plant, in the workshop, in the engineering office. Talking to the people who do the work. Before any proposal and any solution.
Set priorities and requirements
What has to be fixed now, what can wait, what isn't worth touching. A short list of real things, agreed with whoever decides.
Build something workable
Sustainable with the people and systems that are actually there. A perfect solution the organisation can't carry is a failed solution.
Verify and consolidate
An indicator agreed before starting, checked afterwards. And the handover to whoever stays: the result has to outlive the person who started it.
What I'm exploring
Where artificial intelligence genuinely helps — and where it doesn't.
After thirty years in industry I've taken the time to look at things from the outside. I'm using this period to work out one thing in particular: which operational problems that I know well are finally solvable with today's digital tools, and which will keep on requiring nothing but people, process and discipline.
This isn't a new interest. Digitalising processes has been a constant part of my work in recent years.
01 — The ground I know
Industrial problems seen up close
The areas I've worked in longest, and still think about:
- Product and process quality: field complaints, warranty, root causes
- Operations and supply chain: inventory, S&OP, plant flows
- Product development and new model launch management
- Technical service and the service network: tools, response times, knowledge
- Organisation of technical functions and change management
These are the places where I can tell a real problem from an apparent one.
02 — The ground I'm exploring
Digital tools built around the real work
I'm learning to build applications — web and mobile — to test one hypothesis: that the useful tools are the ones designed by people who know the process, not the most feature-complete ones.
It's work in progress, not a service catalogue. Whatever works will end up here.
AI is a means, not the end. It should make people more effective, information more accessible and processes more robust. If a problem can be solved with a clear procedure and a spreadsheet, that's the right answer — and no model is needed. The hard part isn't the technology: it's knowing exactly what the tool has to do, and to know that you have to have done that job.
Ideas in the lab
Things worth building.
Notes, not promises. These are the tools I could have used over the years and never found in the right form: small, close to the process, in the hands of the people doing the work.
Non-conformity management
Reported from the shop floor in seconds, photo attached, routed to the right function, status always visible.
Failure and recurrence analysis
Field complaints grouped by failure mode, not by part number. Recurrences surface on their own, before they turn into a campaign.
Knowledge for technical service
Solutions already found, searchable in plain language by the technician with their hands on the machine. On a phone too, and offline.
Audit tools
Digital process and product checklists, photo evidence, scores and action plans that don't get lost after the closing meeting.
Operational dashboards
The few indicators that actually matter, updated by themselves, readable by a director in thirty seconds and by a shop supervisor in ten.
Decision support
Actions prioritised by impact, cost and recurrence. The data reaches the table where the decision is made, not a month later.
Configurators and utilities
Calculation or configuration tools for a sales network, for technicians, or directly for whoever uses the product.
Your idea
Have a tool in mind that would make your life easier and doesn't exist? I'd like to hear it: that's exactly the kind of conversation I'm looking for.
Working ideas. They do not represent completed projects or available tools.
Get in touch
If any of this reminded you of a problem you know, let's talk about it.
I'm interested in conversations with people who deal every day with industrial processes, quality, technical service or supply chain: exchanges about concrete problems, shared experience, ideas for tools worth building.
I reply personally. If you're looking for something more formal, the best way is to write to me and start from there.
How to reach me
-
Email
[email protected] -
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/luciani-alessandro -
Where I am
Turin, Italy -
Languages
Italiano · English · Español · Français
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