Who's the Customer?
Located in northern Italy, Dalla Nora is a family-owned company that for the last 50 years has been processing semi-finished products for the furniture industry. Concentrating for the most part on mid to high-quality products, the finishing process, whether it concerns a painted, veneered or raw element, must underpin the perceived quality of the furniture itself. Dalla Nora takes pride in design, detail and consistency as key aspects of what defines “Made-in-Italy” quality. Efficiency and constant control over the quality produced are company fundamentals.
The challenge
Addressing the needs of an increasingly dynamic and flexible market, Dalla Nora has also turned to delivering complete assembled and packaged furniture on top of managing just-in-time semi-finished products. To keep pace with this market, the company has always been committed to investing in the latest technologies and equipment in order to respond quickly and grow their business.
Dalla Nora now wanted to increase production capacity by adding a finishing line both for wood veneer and wooden substrates, a single line able to apply primer, finishing layer and even high-gloss lacquer. As well as being extremely flexible, the idea was to make it a fully automatic line able to ensure consistent quality, efficiency and productivity that was harder to achieve with manual spraying techniques.
The Cefla Finishing solution
The existing roller coating line was unable to provide the flexibility required, so in order to handle different substrate thicknesses, in July 2023 we installed a spray coating line with fast colour change solutions. This made it possible to coat surfaces and edges in a single pass, whereas with the roller coating line only surfaces were processed while edges had to be coated previously. In addition, the quality of open-pore coatings has improved compared to the UV roller coating line.
We configured a line featuring Smartclean, a brushing and sanding machine, an iBotic K Cartesian spraying robot and Omnidry, our highly flexible drying oven. The flexibility provided by iBotic K enables fast colour and product changes, and lets you use solvent or water-based paints. Grammage management is also available, allowing us to control how much lacquer is used to coat the panel surface, whereas the roller coating line was limited in its ability to control and especially increase or decrease the amount of paint applied.
As the long-term plan also aims at greater sustainability, this line will easily handle more and more water-based lacquers, moving away from solvent-based alternatives. Omnidry is a drying solution that can easily be set up to dry water-based lacquers with UV lamps.
The Results
Measured, consistent application which is controlled throughout the process has led to better quality and production capacity, which has increased by around 35%. Using a spraying robot instead of operators manually coating pieces for what we could not accomplish on the roller coating line has resulted in a continuous workflow. Of course, the proportion of rejects or waste material has diminished significantly, helping to reduce costs and processing times.
What the customer said
Just over a year after the line was commissioned, Michele Dalla Nora says he has been impressed by the “quick and effective answers” provided by the after-sales team at Cefla to resolve any issues arising since July 2023. “Pleased to have chosen Cefla” as a partner, he also plans to add UV lamps to handle the drying of water-based paints as well as a handling system on the line to achieve a closed-circuit configuration in which panels are processed on both sides without interrupting production.
