EPTAcademy, making custom programs “cool”

“To propel our resources towards the business of the future.” This had been the objective that Marco Nocivelli, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Epta Group, had set at the beginning of the EPTAcademy training program, which just wrapped up with the graduation ceremony. And based on the level of involvement and satisfaction expressed by the participants, the faculty, and the company, we can say it has been fully attained. To paraphrase the company’s pay-off, the Academy was “The best solution for your work” for all of them. Indeed, this initiative developed by SDA Bocconi and Epta, a multinational group specialized in commercial refrigeration, seems to be one of those destined to leave its mark on the organization, on the business, and its impact on the market.

Employing almost 6,000 people and reaching sales of over 900 million euro, the Epta Group – who recently won the Best Performance Award 2018 – is an important player on the international scene, where it operates under several brands. Investing in human resources has long been part of the company’s policies, according to Marco Nocivelli.

Commercial refrigeration is a highly specialized sector, one that calibrates itself on the needs of the customer, where the human factor is absolutely strategic and advanced managerial skills can make the competitive difference. These are the foundations of the EPTAcademy, a medium/long-term training path developed in collaboration with the School.

Investing in leadership and talent

The Academy created two separate projects: the first was the EPTA Leadership Program (ELP), dedicated to the group’s senior management. It involved 18 days of in-class sessions divided into 3 main modules, delivered over the course of a year. It aims to enhance those sets of skills and knowledge a leader needs in an international context. This was later followed by the EPTA Talent Program (ETP), which concluded its second edition today: a more concentrated format – 25 days in 5 modules over 12 months – designed to cultivate, motivate, and retain the best corporate resources by consolidating their key managerial expertise (general management, accounting and finance, marketing, operations and innovation, organization and human resources).

Both projects involved participants from different countries, creating a particularly rich and fruitful environment in which to debate and share opinions. The active and diversified training method, consisting of business cases, exercises, simulations, and role playing, facilitated the approach to the broader topics, and made the classroom experiences directly applicable to each participant’s daily job, helping them bring global challenges in line with their local dimension.

At the end of this edition of EPTAcademy, Beppe Soda, Dean of SDA Bocconi, said: “SDA Bocconi is proud of its partnership with companies such as Epta who, by investing in the development of their own talents, build a double paradigm of sustainability: sustainability for the company, which can thus count on people who can give back to the organization with a richer and more updated set of skills; and sustainability for the individuals, who find renewed energy for their daily business activities thanks to this constant engagement with professors and colleagues.

“The pursuit of a strategy aimed at ensuring the success of the Group is a constant commitment for Epta, who sees the leadership of its team as its most important competitive tool. People are, in fact, the pillars on which to build our future history,” stated Marco Nocivelli, who then added: “We are very proud of the EPTAcademy project we developed with SDA Bocconi. It is a program aimed at enhancing the skills of our team, as key elements that will allow us to achieve our ambitious growth goals.”

SDA Bocconi School of Management