UPG Enterprises on digital transformation and automation

UPG Enterprises provides shared services across a series of companies which it owns, primarily in the steel service centre and logistics industries. The company also provides technology enablement - from IT to HR, and finance to marketing - while looking for areas where it can introduce new, more mature processes, to help the businesses it owns run more successfully.

Joe Madda is the CIO at UPG Enterprises and has been with the company for two years. In his role, he oversees the IT teams, which are made up of a help desk and infrastructure team, a digital marketing team, an enterprise services team, and a data services team.

“I've always been interested in technology,” Madda says. “Even as a kid, I always had computers and tinkered with them to figure out how they worked. That got me into programming.”

Since UPG manages numerous manufacturing businesses, there is a lot of opportunity for automation, especially in operations.

“The adoption of robotics, system consolidation and creating better visibility can help us make better decisions with real-time data,” says Madda. “But the adoption of hardware that we think will help make us more efficient, it's not the sort of thing you can do overnight. But our people, in the end, are our greatest assets.”