The CAE management team has been strengthened: interview with new Technical Director

Meet Luca Papandrea, an engineer who joined the CAE family in 2009 and has been the company's Technical Director for a year now, as well as Deputy General Manager and Board Member.

In his role as Technical Director, he is committed to ensuring that activities are carried out correctly and comply with the regulations. He constantly discusses critical issues in jobs with the Project Managers, and takes actions in the relevant business areas to solve them.

His appointment as Technical Director, a role formerly held by CAE's founding partner, Paolo Bernardi, is the result of the owner’s desire to manage the company with a combined managerial and entrepreneurial approach.

What was your career path?

I joined CAE as a student to do an internship in preparation for my thesis, working on a project geared towards corporate reorganisation. It was 2009, and there was a generational transition in the company.

Immediately after graduation I joined CAE as an apprentice working in human resources and organisation, and after about a year I started a project to rationalise information systems that led to a major overhaul of corporate processes, which lasted a couple of years overall.

After that, I held the position of Deputy and then Director of Operations, which allowed me to get to know the company in depth, its founding values, people, habits, working methods and procedures. 

What values guide the company's choices?

CAE is characterised by a strong propensity to acquire new skills and an ability to exploit those already established in non-traditional areas. We want to keep this approach alive because enables us to take on many new and exciting challenges, and allows us to continue growing.

The value that guides us is certainly the desire to focus on the customer, always bearing in mind the ultimate goal for both of us, so being strongly aware of the importance of what we are called upon to do. We are not just a technology provider, but above all a serviceprovider, which is why we always work alongside administrations, especially when there are critical issues.

This is reflected in the importance of ensuring quality at all times, a key factor in achieving maximum reliability from our equipment and control systems.

Quality is also reflected in terms of the skills and expertise required to achieve the aforementioned goals; hence the importance of the people who make up the company and those who work with it.

That is why we are committed to building stable, lasting relationships that lead to personal and professional growth in an environment where attention to safety at work is also at the forefront. 

What strategic aspects are you working on today?

As already mentioned, customer satisfaction must guide our choices, which is why we are trying to get to grips with some of the critical issues that have emerged from discussions with them.

For example, we want to improve the execution speed of field activities, while maintaining quality and attention to safety and compliance with all applicable regulations. To do this, we are working on our internal structure and organisation, suppliers, standardisation, and we are aiming to become more independent by strengthening our ability to perform certain crucial activities ourselves in order to reduce the time to complete installations.

We shouldn’t forget the importance of services, which we are working on to further increase quality, including in relation to their interconnection with technology. Of course, that’s not nearly all, so I invite you to continue reading our CAE Magazine to find out more.