Italian Casting and Machining Group C2MAC Builds Reliable Foundation for Growth with AWS

Italian casting and machining group C2MAC turned to AWS to reduce business risk as it expanded its operations through a series of acquisitions. Switching to AWS helped the group improve the availability of its IT infrastructure, overcome issues with legacy technology, and tap into modern IT capabilities, such as IoT.

C2MAC Group has been operating casting and machining plants across Italy for more than 50 years. The group traces its origins back to the Fonderie di Montorso business in north east Italy, a gray cast iron plant that creates components used in the agriculture, automotive, and construction industries. Seeing opportunities to expand the business, the group has been rapidly acquiring manufacturing plants across the country—four in the past year. Now C2MAC combines the best foundry technologies with mechanical machining to offer quality with specialization in hydraulics and seal rings.

A major challenge when creating the new group has been integrating the new companies, supporting manufacturing continuity, and ensuring full use of production plant capacity. These factors mean the IT infrastructure has become even more crucial. The group’s attempts to run all of the systems to ensure efficient operations required extensive management by the internal IT team. The legacy technologies it relied on were not flexible enough to accommodate all of the change and were becoming too costly and time-consuming to maintain. “Our main concern is reducing any risk to keep our plants operating at maximum capacity at all times,” says Paolo Viola, chief financial officer at the C2MAC Group. “The IT infrastructure is one of the main elements supporting our manufacturing continuity.” 

To achieve the business growth it desired, the group realized it was time to modernize its IT. It turned to local AWS Advanced Consulting Partner Miriade, which recommended moving its on-premises resources to Amazon Web Services (AWS), starting with its core ERP processes running on SAP.

“The plan was to evolve the infrastructure from only on-premises to hybrid cloud, and to migrate the core ERP processes to the cloud,” says Matteo Durighetto, data architect at Miriade.

Miriade helped C2MAC both design the infrastructure and manage the Moving to the cloud simplified maintenance for the IT team and improved reliability, reducing the risk that its workshops could not operate efficiently. Miriade also implemented the business continuity capability.

With AWS, C2MAC has reduced the number of IT maintenance tasks by 62 percent and has seen a 15 percent reduction in service interruptions caused by system malfunctions.
“It was important to be able to have high availability in case of failure of an availability zone, and to migrate with the minimum downtime possible for the infrastructure,” says Durighetto.

AWS also provides centralized tools that help the IT team easily manage its resources, and has reduced the costs associated with the testing and quality-control environments. In total, the company has seen a 37 percent reduction in total cost of ownership for IT operations, compared to its previous setup.

“Working with Miriade and AWS has given us the ability to easily integrate the IT operations of all of the new businesses we’ve acquired,” says Viola.

As well as helping C2MAC with the infrastructure design and migration, Miriade has raised the level of AWS expertise within the C2MAC IT team. “Because we want to keep growing, it’s important for us to develop our IT staff,” says Viola. “Working with Miriade has allowed us to develop the internal AWS skills that we’ll need in the future.”