The emergence of a global market has created many new opportunities for an epochal change in the way products are manufactured and supplied. In the past, we only compared products, their peculiarities and value for the money: my product sold better than someone else's due to a set of qualities that differentiated it or because it cost less for equal characteristics or for both reasons. Then, we would say that my product had a better quality/price ratio than the competitor's.
Then, this was no longer enough because the market expanded and there was a need to improve communication: I might certainly have the best product but if I wasn't able to make it know, it was as if it didn't exist. For this reason, it was necessary to increase sales distribution and improve advertising.
The need to mitigate modern man's relationship with the planet led to the concept of recycling products and their accessory components (such as packaging), as well as the introduction of production materials and technologies with less environmental impact.
All of these reasons created corporate costs that were not directly linked to production. Improvements in occupational safety and working conditions in general led to changes in production processes, the replacement and improvement of systems, lower specific productivity due to short work hours and the need to add additional, shorter shifts.
All of this helped improve the quality of our working lives and products and to mitigate the impact on the environment. The advent of a global market and the consequent growth of many emerging nations has sharply increased competition and lowered prices, all at the expense of quality and reliability.
La possibilità operativa delle aziende ha dovuto subire consistenti mutamenti, sia sul fronte della tipologia del prodotto che nella stessa filosofia produttiva. L'impossibilità materiale di competere nella produzione in grande serie con i costi estremamente ridotti della produzione orientale ha progressivamente orientato la produzione verso prodotti a termoformatura a tiratura limitata, ma a più alto contenuto qualitativo e tecnologico o a personalizzazione di prodotti consolidati. Parallelamente si sono incrementati e migliorati i servizi accessori che mirano alla fornitura non del mero prodotto, ma di un insieme di prestazioni che aumentano il valore del prodotto, che diventa non più fine a se stesso, ma parte di un servizio.
Companies now find that their operational choices are increasingly limited both in terms of the type of product and its production philosophy. Extremely low Asian labor costs make it impossible for manufacturers in developed countries to be economically competitive in mass production and this has progressively led to an orientation towards thermoforming shorter runs of well-established products with higher quality, more technological