My career began with an electrical apprenticeship at ÖBB, the Austrian Federal Railways. In the railway workshops I learnt the trade from the ground up: wiring and testing control cabinets and switchgear, fault-finding on rolling stock and maintaining the equipment that keeps a railway running, all in an industry where safety and getting it right first time come before everything.
Once qualified I moved into the drinks industry as a maintenance electrician at Rauch, one of Austria's best-known fruit juice and soft drinks producers. Working on high-speed filling and packaging lines for PET, glass and cans taught me how much a minute of downtime costs and how to get a line running again quickly: fault-finding on PLCs, drives, sensors and conveyors, often in the middle of a night shift, then finding the cause so it didn't happen again.
That led me to Rexam, at the time one of the world's largest beverage can makers and now part of Ball. I started in electrical maintenance and moved on to the plant's software and automation systems, looking after and improving the controls on cuppers, bodymakers, washers, ovens, decorators, neckers and palletisers. Much of that work was upgrades: replacing obsolete controls, improving line speeds and diagnostics, and bringing new equipment through installation and commissioning while the plant kept producing.
At Hirschmann Automotive, which makes connectors and cable systems for the car industry, I became a systems software development and commissioning engineer on the company's own production machinery: automated assembly lines, electrical test and vision inspection stations, robot cells and the traceability systems that track every part. I wrote the PLC, HMI and robot software, commissioned the machines in Austria and at plants abroad, and trained the people who would run and maintain them.
Like Steve and David, I have spent my working life on the tools, on the software and on site, in industries where machines have to run fast, safely and around the clock. I have now joined PLC & Drives Company as a systems software development and commissioning engineer, bringing that experience, and German as well as English, to our customers' projects.
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