Meet our People: Oliver Hechtl, Head of Strategic Data Management and Integration

Oliver is part of the “Technical Competence Center”- a team within Zuken Europe that is responsible for the deployment and maintenance of Zuken solutions in the field. We recently sat down for a chat and he shared some of his experiences with me.

After graduating from university, I started out as a business-consultant employed at a small local software consultancy start-up in Munich. My first experiences with larger customers like Hewlett Packard or O2/Telekom have inspired me to stay close to such customer environments. Since 2003 I am working at Zuken. The product development and production processes in the industry are the ultimate terrains where innovation happens and where innovation can actually be seen to drive productivity growth.

Developing the value chain of Zuken’s solutions

I love to meet customers, learn about them and their challenges, and find out how we at Zuken can help and be a part of the solution. Gaining an in-depth understanding of the challenges is the first step to enable creative minds in matching flexible solutions.

With this knowledge, we can focus on developing the value chain of Zuken’s solutions for a product-based, flexible integration into the customer’s corporate PLM ecosystem. Progressing pragmatic solutions for real-world industrial applications means staying agile and adapting the solution to a constantly changing technological environment.

Supplier partnerships are a hot topic these days – Zuken is revitalizing and modernizing its partnerships in many places. The suppliers of solutions should be embraced as a part of an extended workbench for collaboration – the automotive industry is a leader here. The collaboration of suppliers among each other and as trusted partners for customers becomes key in realizing comprehensive, competitive consortium solutions across the horizontal and vertical integrations of the product development process.

Another key objective of my work is to support our customers’ needs in their digital transformation processes for electric and electronic engineering domains driving towards a smart digital twin. For a successful digital transformation, it is even more essential to capture and innovate the engineering and production processes compared to just modeling the product itself. Currently, I am enthusiastically learning about the overall system architecture model (SAM) focusing on the process alignment from E/E with its cross-discipline levels upstream to MBSE and downstream to the factory.

Team-of-teams culture

At the moment, we are working to establish a team-of-teams culture across our organizations. This means the relationship among different teams resembles the closeness among the individuals of those teams. In an ever more connected and dynamic world, the trend is: “only well-collaborating teams can win”. Teams are effective if they trust each other and they have a shared purpose, so the ultimate goal is to reach the “team-of-teams” philosophy, based on mutual trust, respect, and friendship. Collectively we support and build our local teams’ capabilities whilst supporting and promoting our wider Zuken family that increases collaboration and recognizes the individual’s expertise.

Since Covid-19 struck, my typical day starts usually in the home office with a coffee, where I share a LAN-network with my kids stuck in home-schooling. The internet is amazing to enable working remotely with my team and with customers around the world. We are all Microsoft Teams experts by now 🙂

But even though web meetings have proven to be just as efficient, I miss the social interaction face to face. Actually seeing someone smile and being in the same room again. The stats on my activity tracker are devastating – I used to reach 10k steps per day, now down to 2-3k. Let’s hope this pandemic is over soon.

Our adventure of life

Work is just a small part of our “adventure of life”. There is a universe out there to be explored. And this brings me to my side job: sponsor and supporter of my kid’s activities.

I enjoy spending time outdoors with my family whenever possible – cycling and mountain sports in both summer and winter are my favorite things to do, aside from renovating my home.

I am also a member of our Zuken running team, we get together every Wednesday after work – during the pandemic we had to suspend this for a while due to social distancing rules, but we are ready to resume after Covid. From time to time we join the Virgin global Challenge – check out the Zuken team progress on virginpulse.com.

Connect with Oliver on LinkedIn
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