Donato BlandolinoFrom goods receiving and logistics to plant management: Donato Blandolino on the personal story behind SMART iNTERIM and why transformation fails or succeeds at the interface between operations and SAP.
When someone asks me what exactly SMART iNTERIM does, I could answer with a list of services: restructuring, plant set-up, relocation, series production ramp-up, SAP transformation. All of that is true, and anyone looking for the details can find them on our page about transformation in the manufacturing industry.
But the more honest answer starts earlier. It starts with the fact that I first faced the problems we solve today myself.
Experiencing it on the ground before leading it
I started in 2006 as a logistics team leader in an industrial company, also serving as an SAP Key User for logistics. Then came order processing, materials planning, work preparation and production planning. Later, as an interim leader, I served as deputy head of manufacturing with around 130 employees, working across plants in Switzerland and Mauritius.
That means I experienced transformations on the ground before leading them. I know what it feels like when a new system is introduced and the master data is wrong. When a concept arrives from head office that cannot work on the shop floor because no one asked how people actually work there. And I know what it is like when the fourth transformation arrives as a presentation and all it gets on the shop floor is a weary smile.
That weary smile is not refusal. It is experience. The team has lived through three attempts that came to nothing and is protecting its energy from the fourth.
The pattern I kept seeing everywhere
From 2013, I worked freelance as an interim leader and specialist in production planning, supply chain and SAP. Watchmaking, powder metallurgy, mechanical engineering, electronics manufacturing. Different companies, different sizes, different systems.
And time and again, the same pattern: the concept is in place, implementation fails.
Not because the concepts were poor. But because between concept and outcome lies the part that no one feels responsible for: taking ownership, making day-to-day operational decisions, working through conflicts between departments, winning the team over and staying the course when things get uncomfortable. By then, the consultant has usually left, and internal management has no capacity for this alongside ongoing series production.
SMART iNTERIM emerged from this pattern in 2018. Not from a market analysis, but from seeing the same thing happen in too many factories.
Why we combine Operations and SAP
For us, this combination is not a portfolio decision, but a reflection of my career. From day one, I worked in both roles: on the operational side in logistics and as a key user of the system. Since then, I have never experienced the two worlds separately, because in reality they are not separate.
A process that does not work on the shop floor will not work in the system either. The reverse is equally true: even the best shop floor is no use if the planning behind it is configured incorrectly. Yet projects regularly assign these two areas to different service providers, and when things get stuck, each points the finger at the other.
That is why we provide both under one roof. Our teams combine operational factory experience with SAP expertise, from production control to S/4HANA transformation. Not because it makes a good sales pitch, but because transformations fail at precisely this interface.
Why bottom-up is not just a slogan for us
For us, change begins on the shop floor, with the people who have to make it happen. From there, we drive it through to executive management, not the other way round.
This is not a method we invented. It is the consequence of our own experience: the information that determines success or failure is almost always found at shop-floor level. The machine setter knows why the machine has really stopped. The shift supervisor knows which non-standard procedure has crept in. Anyone who only involves these people at the training stage has squandered the project’s most important source of knowledge and, along the way, lost the support of the very people who are supposed to make the change happen.
A top-down approach is still needed: decisions, resources, backing. But the substance of a transformation comes from the opposite direction.
What this has become
Today, SMART iNTERIM is a transformation partner for the manufacturing industry, with four business areas: Operational Transformation, SAP and Enterprise Transformation, Program & Project Management, and Interim Management and Executive Search. Depending on the programme phase, we work with integrated teams of interim executives, programme managers, SAP architects and operational specialists.
Our benchmark has remained the same from the start: we do not just recommend, we implement, and we stay until it works. Whether it still works after we have left determines the value of the assignment, not the report at the end.
And above it all stands the sentence that has stayed with us through all these years: Competence is a prerequisite. Personality makes the difference. Personality First.
If you have an initiative coming up, or one that has stalled, write to me directly.
About the author
Donato Blandolino is the founder and Managing Director of SMART iNTERIM Management GmbH. His career took him from goods receipt and logistics through production planning and work preparation into operational leadership roles with responsibility for around 130 employees, before he founded SMART iNTERIM in 2018.
About SMART iNTERIM
SMART iNTERIM Management is a transformation partner for manufacturing: Operational Transformation, SAP and Enterprise Transformation, Program & Project Management, as well as Interim Management and Executive Search. We bring hands-on experience, not a detached perspective. Headquartered in Switzerland, with an office in Dubai.
Read more
- Transformation in the manufacturing industry: /insights/transformation-produzierende-industrie
- Donato Blandolino, Team & Profile: /team/donato-blandolino
- Personality First: Why personality makes the difference: /blog/personality-first
