When no project is ever standard, standards become key
- References / Success Stories
- Drive Technology
- 25.8.2026
- Reading Time: {{readingTime}} min
Contents
From General Automation to Sheet Metal Handling Specialist
Over the years, META has developed solutions for a wide range of industrial automation fields. The team had learned a lot from this cross-sector approach when they decided, driven by growth, to focus their skills and energies onto a single field: the handling of sheet metal. META designs complete feeding systems for belt-sanding machines and develops solutions that address sector-specific technical challenges. And holds quite a few patents for metal sheet processing solutions, too. One of these is META’s automatic protective film insertion system: just one operator instead of two, and immediate material savings thanks to perfect application from the very first panel.
The company is led by its founder and CEO Gian Paolo Minatel, alongside his three children: Leonardo and Mattia in design and technical operations, both with a good sense of business and humor, and Valentina in administration. A close-knit family team, capable of ensuring the solid structure needed to support such ambitious projects.
“No project is ever ‘standard’ in this business. Years of experience in industrial automation and machine building have taught us that every business has unique requirements. In order to be able to fulfill this wide variety of requirements on a machine building and engineering level, we need a highly standardized base within our solutions.”
Rising Quality Requirements Are Shaping the Market
One of META’s production lines is installed at Nichelcrom – a metal sheet processing company located in the Milano area specialized in custom cutting and surface finishing of stainless steel strips and sheets. The processed steel is used for applications e.g. in the automotive, food, and chemistry industries.
On the question which trends impact the Nichelcrom business at the moment, Simone Rampulla, purchaser with Nichelcrom, replies: “We observe a growing demand for higher-performance materials, better surface quality, and more consistent processing standards.”
With end customers also demanding tighter tolerances, greater reliability, and full traceability across the production chain, the goal of shorter lead times put quite a lot of pressure on efficiency and planning.
On top of that, issues like energy efficiency, safety, and cybersecurity are becoming increasingly important both in equipment design and in supplier selection. “We see a growing need for solutions that are more compliant, more transparent, and easier to integrate into customer requirements. This means paying much greater attention to documentation, data availability, and long-term reliability”, adds Rampulla.
Flexibility Becomes a Key Competitive Advantage
We asked META as a machine builder the same question and the requirements get even more complex. What do their end customers expect? Minatel highlights two aspects: on the one hand metal sheets to be processed are becoming larger and thicker, which requires extremely robust yet precise systems.
Minatel: “The real challenge here is flexibility: end customers now demand the ability to request different types of finishing using the same system. This forces us to design machines capable of quickly adapting to diverse processing requirements while guaranteeing the highest quality standards across every product variant.”
Customers Are Looking for End-to-End Project Partners
In their sector, though, the most prominent trend is the demand for a single point of contact.
Minatel: “Customers no longer want to manage a multitude of different suppliers; they are looking for a partner who can guarantee continuity from the purchasing phase through to the installation and final commissioning of the new lines.”
For META this means acting as technical and strategic coordinators. This centralization is a huge advantage for the customer: it ensures seamless integration and that everything works perfectly from day one.
“This is the only way to guarantee full customer satisfaction and meet deadlines on large-scale systems,” adds Minatel.
Overall, regulations and standards are pushing the market towards higher responsibility, higher quality, and better risk management.
Rampulla continues: “This is exactly why we need to work together with partners who are able to deliver solutions that truly enable us in reaching these targets. Only those companies who can deliver and service top notch machines will be able to do business. The environment is very tough and competition, mainly from Asia, rather harsh right now.”
The job to be done: managing complex processes over 80 meters with up to 60 axes
And it is exactly in this search for standards that KEBA could support META. The cooperation started 2021 when META were looking for a solution in the field of motion control management for a complex sheet metal handling system.
“The primary requirement was standardization, indeed,” explains Minatel. “We wanted to unify the brushless motors and the relative drives to simplify design and maintenance.”
The main challenge lay in space management and configuration for systems that manage a high number of axes over significant lengths. Lines of META can measure up to 80 meters in length, sometimes even more. KEBA responded with its multi-axis drives, allowing META to optimize control with extreme efficiency.
The process to be managed was not basic at all. Fabrizio Rossetto, Technical Engineer at KEBA Italy: “We needed to figure out how to handle the large and heavy plate sizes, carefully taking into consideration the planarity and quality of the surface. To meet this requirement, we developed a centralized control architecture based on a single controller and four decentralized control cabinets distributed along the production line. The solution integrates a total of 23 multi-axis drives and approximately 60 motors operating in a coordinated manner, ensuring the precision, synchronization, and reliability required by the application. META confronted us with a true challenge. But this is what we love and what we are really good at.”
KeDrive D3 Marks a Technical Turning Point
META initially started with the KEBA ServoOne series, but the evolution of their systems lead them to adopt the KeDrive D3 system. Today, their systems manage over 60 axes on rather long lines.
Minatel: “This switch to KeDrive D3 was the real turning point: while the ServoOne is an excellent stand-alone drive, the KeDrive D3 is a modular system that, thanks to the Tri-axis module, drastically reduces the number of physical components and the footprint in the control cabinets. An advantage that no other competitor could guarantee.”
Distributed Drive Technology Delivers Decisive Advantages
One of the reasons why META opted for KEBA was its architectural flexibility.
Minatel: “On 80-meter lines, centralized management is inefficient; KEBA allows us to distribute the drives into several electrical cabinets located along the line, optimizing space, cabling, and costs,” Minatel explains.
But not only products and their architecture matter in business. Minatel adds: “Having a constant commercial and technical point of contact guarantees us unparalleled operational security and responsiveness in the configuration of every axis, which in our current business environment is extremely valuable.”
KEBA’s technological depth and the understanding of customers’ processes seem to be a difference to other suppliers in the market.
Minatel: “Managing over 60 axes with other suppliers would have lead to control cabinets twice as large and a much more burdensome and complex spare parts management.”
An Open Automation Platform for Maximum Integration
Furthermore, the KEBA EtherCAT based controller provides a complete environment for servo axes motion sequences, centralizing in a single point all the control functionalities, drive configurations and machine logic.
“KEBA’s open standard based automation platform Kemro X allows the widest interface to other line controllers, as well as network connectivity.”
For META, KEBA is not just a component supplier. “KEBA is an extension of our technical department that helps us add value to our patented projects”, Minatel explains.
And it is such relationships one can build on. META for instance also intend to adopt KEBA brushless motors for their systems allowing them to benefit from a complete and native ecosystem in order to further optimize the motor-drive combination and to guarantee their machinery has even higher performance and simplified diagnostics.
Minatel: “KEBA’s ability to constantly innovate allows us to accept design challenges on increasingly large, fast, and ambitious systems and therefore helps us secure our market position”.
With the upcoming adoption of the KEBA brushless motors with electronic nameplates and auto-recognition, commissioning procedures can be further simplified.
Rossetto: “Furthermore, the use of the drives' integrated Condition Monitoring functions will allow users to verify the performance of the axes and the system over time, providing a database for an even more efficient predictive maintenance service."
More about META: Automazioni Meta: Custom sheet-metal automation since 2001
