Vincenzo Marino travaillait pour une entreprise qui utilisait des robots sur une chaîne de montage dans l'industrie automobile. Là, il a vu les ouvriers rester inactifs pendant que l'usine attendait une pièce cruciale que quelqu'un avait oublié de commander. "Chaque fois que vous faites une erreur, l'entreprise perd du temps et de l'argent", observe Marino.
En 1989, Marino part rejoindre unitec">Unitec, un fournisseur d'externalisation spécialisé dans la gestion de la chaîne d'approvisionnement et la logistique.
The company has two offices in Europe, one in Augsburg, Germany, the other in Sabaudia, Italy. Marino, the CEO, was determined to improve the process. Marino says his goal was to offer his customers the ability to consolidate their buying and make Unitec their sole purchasing office. The outsourcing provider would help its buyers avoid costly purchasing errors, consolidate purchasing to save money and simplify billing. Marino started his outsourcing venture with the auto industry, because that's where his expertise lay. Now Unitec has added the printing, rubber and chemical industries to its client roster. Its typical customer has 10,000 or more suppliers. In 1995, to avoid the growing mountain of paper, Unitec began to use an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application for its procurement activities. Marino, who is also a programmer, wrote the ERP program himself. Unitec was paperless in 24 months. Going paperless eliminated the need to store old receipts or archive the information on microfilm, saving the customers money.