Andrey Golub, Icol Group,: “We are the first one in the world to provide a fully robotic production line”

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Andrey Golub, Icol Group
Andrey Golub – ICOL Italia’s General Manager

ELSE Corp’s co-founder and ICOL Italia’s General Manger explained the current and future strategies of the international group, ready to take on worldwide markets.

“Ours is a pivotal challenge, we are the first one to ever launch a fully robotic footwear production line, able to guarantee top-notch manufacturing capacity,” stated Andrey Golub, ELSE Corp’s co-founder and ICOL Italia’s General Manager, when we met him at Simac Tanning Tech. His group is ready to take on the most prominent international competitors, thanks to high-tech technologies on a global scale. “With the recent agreements,” explained Golub, “we believe we have found the right partner for the company’s development and said strengthening paves the way to further significant projects in the months to come.”

></em></p> <h4><em>Simac Tanning Tech marks your first participation in an international trade show…</em></h4> <p><em>Icol Group has been developing at a fast pace in the footwear and leatherware sectors. Our team is made up of talented professionals that design innovative, unrivalled machines. The company provides solution for both small- and large- sized enterprises, while customized production, compliant with the Industry 4.0 concept, will result in an overall change for firms, giving them the chance to manage huge data flows that will significantly reduce information processing time.</em></p> <h4><em>How did you deal with this issue?</em></h4> <p><em>The elimination of human labour from routine operations will give to customers the opportunity to handle effectively multiple orders of both small and large batches in terms of performances, quality standards and price. Cutting-edge technology is the future and we are planning the perfect strategy for the years to come. ICOL Group’s mission is to implement a high-tech, innovative approach for industrial automation and to develop an artificial intelligence-based platform that allows customers to easily integrate robotics, logistics and processes.</em></p> <h4><em>Belarus has played a key role in the corporate history, you still own some facilities there…</em></h4> <p><em>After the dissolution of the USSR, chaos reigned, the citizens’ demand for shoes was high, yet production was basically non-existent. As Belwest’s partner, we managed to establish a “giant”, currently featuring 400 stores, that manufactures 2 million pairs of shoes per year. After that, it was almost our duty to focus on smart automation, not only to increase production while lowering the number of employees, but also in terms of flexibility. The articles are sold throughout Russia and in former Soviet Union countries, areas in which temperatures range from -45°C during the winter season to +45°C in summer: with such an extreme climate, a comprehensive array of products is required, from frost-resistant boots to sandals.</em></p> <h4><em>Where is the headquarters based?</em></h4> <p><em>In the new factory based in Vitebsk, a city with over 350 thousand inhabitants, located north of Minsk. More than three thousand people work in this cluster, that houses the group’s technological and strategic “brain” as well. Dmitry Gontsov is one of the owners, previously acting as General Manager, engaged in the development of several initiatives. When he understood that said ideas were working, he chose to become a full-fledged entrepreneur, thus establishing ICOL Group in 2017. The growth has been incredible: at the beginning, there were 17 employees, now the manpower amounts to several hundreds of specialized tests, equipped with cutting-edge technologies: next step will be the digitization of the whole production process, thoroughly automated, while robotics will swiftly perform several operations at the same time.</em></p> <h4><em>As for leather processing, how do you proceed?</em></h4> <p><em>The most delicate and significant phase, now fully digitalized, concerns leather selection and the subsequent cutting phase. The true innovation lies in the implementation of a “scanner” that analyses automatically a series of operations, including the choice of quality and colour, examining each single hide available in the digital warehouse. Each setting is connected to the robots’ movements, incredibly precise yet fast, able to guarantee a high production capacity, roughly more than 800 pairs of shoes for each eight-hour work shift, almost two thousand per day. Besides being a manufacturing facility, it is also a “testing factory” that provides top-notch articles. For us, it has acted as a huge R&D laboratory, a true asset for ICOL’s project: the things working well in such an extreme context, will suitable for every other production cluster worldwide as well.</em></p> <p><em><strong>Can you tell us something about ICOL Group’s short-term </strong><strong>strategies?</strong></em></p> <p><em>We will take on the global markets, we have the right structure to succeed. Our customers, both current and potential ones, have their eyes set on innovation, maybe they have already tried other technologies but are not yet satisfied. Some have come to visit us and we are ready to meet their demands. Shoe factories are our customers, while, within the same framework, tanneries will be our partners: to the latter we will provide solutions and the “scanning” project. More specifically, footwear manufacturers are interested in solving the so-called “bottleneck” issue with the regard to the storage phase and leather analysis: shoes must be assembled and, thanks to our technologies, we prevent, among other things, having too many unused pieces in the warehouse.</em></p> <h4><em>One last question: what are your prospects for the sector’s future?</em></h4> <p><em>The only way to bring production back to Europe, concerning not so much the luxury segment rather the mid/low-end one, lies in automation. This system will guarantee excellent results in the safety footwear sector as well, another field in which Italy is at the forefront. We do not plan to sell the single robots, but the software programme, the latter patented together with the machine settings of the robots as well as of the connected tools for different operations, like pieces movement or cutting. We have developed these movements thoroughly, each one with a specific programme to carry out, thus allowing to change the tool during the processing cycle. <a href=http://icol-group.com