I have worked both in the plants, close to the assembly line, the test bench and the service workshop, and at headquarters, with management responsibilities up to the Board of Directors.
The customer as the reference point
In my work I have always tried to point the organisation's activities towards customers and their satisfaction. I have dealt with very different customers: tradespeople who use commercial vehicles for their work, municipal operators running public transport for their communities, farmers, and armies from half of Europe on peacekeeping missions around the world.
THE STAGES
The beginnings, at Iveco and in Spain1997–2005 · from the Daily line in Suzzara to the one in Valladolid
I started in 1997 at Iveco in Suzzara, on the Daily assembly line, as production line manager; then I moved to shop-floor quality and product quality. In December 2000 I moved to Valladolid, first as Plant Quality Manager and then as head of the body-in-white shop, and I stayed there for more than four years. That is where I learned to work in a plant and an industrial culture different from my own.
Iveco and CNH Industrial2005–2015 · Eurocargo, Iveco Bus, Defence, Bus again
From 2005 to 2008 I was responsible for product quality on the Eurocargo range.
From 2008 to 2011 I worked in Lyon, at Iveco Bus, heading Customer Satisfaction & Quality, which brought quality and technical service together on a European scale. For about a year the company had no business leader, and together with the heads of the other departments we ran Iveco Bus, in effect a company within the company, largely on our own, with a monthly review directly with Iveco's CEO, who had taken on the role ad interim. It was a period of great growth, both professional and personal.
From 2011 to 2013 I led product quality at Iveco Defence Vehicles. During that time I was able to talk with the people who used IDV vehicles in the theatres of peacekeeping missions. From those conversations I understood what reliability means when a failure puts the safety of the people on board at stake.
From 2013 to 2015 I went back to Lyon, for product quality across the whole Bus Product Line.
SDF, up to the Board of Directors2015–2026 · quality, R&D, reorganisation, Board and COO
From June 2015 to March 2026 I worked at SDF, Same Deutz-Fahr, a family-owned multinational that designs and builds tractors and agricultural machinery. I joined in Quality and over the years held roles of growing responsibility. From 2021 to 2024 I led the group's R&D and Quality and was a member of its Board of Directors; between 2023 and 2024 I was also Chief Operating Officer, responsible for R&D, quality, production and logistics. In addition, I was joint Managing Director of SDF Italia SpA.
As head of R&D I reorganised the function, oversaw numerous new product launches and started the development of new generations of some of the company's strategic machines and components. That experience taught me to look at the product from the side of those who design it too, not only from that of those who build and repair it.
They were more than ten years in which I led the work on product quality and reliability and, with responsibilities that kept widening, the evolution of the organisation and its processes, including their digitalisation. Together with the teams I led we achieved significant results in product reliability, warranty costs, technical service levels, industrial efficiency, and the development and industrialisation of new products.
Vitibot, in Reims2025–2026 · general management of a scale-up
In 2025 I took on the general management of Vitibot SA in Reims, France, a company part-owned by SDF that develops fully electric autonomous robots for vineyards, while keeping responsibility for the group's Quality. It is a small, technologically advanced business with the typical problems of a scale-up: very different from a structured group, and for that reason it taught me a great deal.
What I learned first-hand
I have almost always worked on technologically complex products, with a large number of components and a high level of innovation, used in the most varied conditions. Over time I learned that experience is a solid foundation, but that sometimes stepping only slightly outside familiar patterns is enough for it to fall short. It is expertise that tells you where a rigorous process is needed and where the know-how you have built up is already enough.
More than once I worked with first-rate suppliers who discovered the limits of their own standards starting from a failure on products I was responsible for. Their expertise was real, but it had been built on different operating conditions: getting to the root cause meant questioning even what had seemed settled.
I have seen production plans that started out as challenging turn out, along the way, to be unrealistic. When nobody says so in time, the bill arrives all at once: first in the plant, then at the customer.
And I have seen the opposite outcome too: problems to fix on machines already delivered which, tackled professionally together with the service network, ended up strengthening the relationship with customers.
People
Of the things I have done over these years, one I paid most attention to is the growth of the people who worked with me. I tried to build responsibility and skills inside the teams, so that they would not depend on me, because that is what stays in the company when a manager leaves.
What I bring with me
First of all, a trait I care a lot about: the ability to settle into the new environments I find myself working in and to listen without prejudice. It served me abroad, in Spain and France, and again in 2015, when I moved from a listed group to a family-owned multinational with a very different company culture. I always start from respect for what is already there, which often has an important history behind it that made it what it is today, and I want to understand before I give my view. Then, when a decision has to be made, I make it firmly, with full knowledge of the facts.
Then the ability to look at an industrial company as a single system, in which product development, production, supply chain, quality and technical service depend on one another and have to be managed together, with the customer as the common reference point. I learned it in large international groups and in a scale-up, going from the assembly line to the operational management of a group and to its Board of Directors. These are levels at which the horizon of decisions changes a great deal: at each of them I tried to turn strategic choices into organisation and processes that people could sustain.
This path also gave me a method: connect the problem in the field, the process that generates it, the data that describes it, the decision that solves it, and measure every improvement with an indicator agreed before starting. I apply it in the same way to a recurring defect and to the reorganisation of a function.
The results of these years were achieved together 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; if you are interested, I am happy to talk about them in person, within the limits of what I can say.
