The UK and Ireland are major markets for Italian saw maker GMM, thanks to its UK agent Roccia Machinery in Derbyshire. Most sales have been to marble and granite processors, but now architectural masonry companies are showing an increasing interest in the bigger Litox bridge saw.
If you want to see stone machinery put through its paces, Italy is a good place to go. And if the saws you are interested in are GMMs, Gravellona Toce near Lake Maggiore on Italy’s Alpine border with Switzerland is ideal because that is where GMM bridge saws are made. The region also has more than 200 granite quarries and processors transforming the stone into the whole gambit of stone products, quite a few of them using GMM saws to do so.
So that is where Roccia Machinery, GMM’s agent for the UK and Ireland, took a group of people, mostly from stone companies in the North of England, in April so they could see the factory where the saws are made and how some of the processors are using them.
The firms represented were Calvert, Hutton Stone, Taylor Made, Dunhouse, Marshalls, Natural Stone Direct, William Anelay, Cumbrian Stone, Mather & Ellis, Ranco / Hollington Stone, Hardscape and Realstone. Suttle Stone from way down South in Purbeck, Dorset, was also represented but was the odd one out, going along because it had already bought a new GMM saw, an Egil, that the company representatives saw in the GMM factory waiting to be shipped. It was delivered and installed during the week of London’s Natural Stone Show in April (the report from the Show starts on page 16 of this issue of Natural Stone Specialist).
It was interesting to listen to the subjects discussed by the people on the visit. The discussion about the machinery itself indicated a significant level of understanding of the technology and several of the those involved said they felt they had learnt not just from the visits to the Italian factories, but also from their discussions with each other, some apparently achieving far greater productivity from their machinery than others. They all agreed technology had to be the way forward for stone processing in the UK.
They also discussed matters of mutual interest – not least about getting paid on time – and some said how useful it had been to be able to put faces to names they had previously dealt with over the ’phone.
GMM’s Chief Executive, Corrado Franzi, met with the visitors. He said it was only Roccia, among all its agents across the World, who organised a visit to the GMM factory for its customers.
The factory is clean and modern with an output that reached almost one unit a day last year – and just over 10% of that output was delivered to the UK, helping Roccia to its best year yet. It also gave GMM its best ever year in the UK, and Roocia also sold more of GMMs edge polishers, the Brembana CNC workcentres it sells and its Socomac cross cut saws and handling equipment.
It was in 2013 that Roccia first took a group of customers to visit GMM. Then, the Roccia visitors were from the South of England and Ireland. And all of the English customers ended up buying GMM saws.
This time there were even more customers on the visit, reflecting the greater interest in the UK stone industry in investing in new machinery now and improving productivity. And the trip was so successful that Roccia says it would like to have a visit every year for groups of its customers.
In 2013, GMM told its visitors that it had produced 20 machines a month in 2012. It was happy with that output because it had maintained its level of production following the banking crisis of 2008, doing so by switching a large number of sales from Italy to exports.
Last year it produced 40% more machines than in 2012 and Corrado Franzi said that so far this year it had delivered more units to the UK than any other country.
Darren Bill, a Director of Roccia who accompanied the customers with his Roccia colleagues Derrick Fretwell and Arran Langford, says he believes the Litox is the ideal saw for the UK architectural masonry market. And his faith in it would seem to be justified as more people are choosing it.
Corrado Franzi is proud that all the machinery from GMM carries the Marmo Macchine Mark. “It’s not easy to get that,” he says. It attests to the origin of the machines and that parts that have to be bought in, such as the cast iron of the bridges, are still from reputable sources – in the case of the bridges another Italian company. But with the quality of the hardware established, Snr Franzi says: “Software is our priority.”
GMM saws are recognised as being user friendly but the company is not complacent and has four engineers employed full time on software development as well as working with Alphacam progressing sophisticated five axes CAD CAM programs. When customers buy a new saw, its commissioning includes training on the software by Arran Langford.
Roccia is proud of the part it plays in delivering successful machinery packages to its customers and with both Derrick Fretwell and Darren Bill having engineering backgrounds themselves, they know the importance of having good engineers on hand to help customers. To ensure the level of service does not deteriorate with such rapidly growing sales, Roccia has just recruited two new engineers – Adam Adin and Matthew Vann. They are fully qualified but have come from outside the stone industry and have been undergoing an intensive training programme.