When employees are in the home office from one day to the next, it is both a challenge and an opportunity, but above all, IT is needed! New software, modern collaboration tools, and an expansion of the bandwidth so that we could continue to serve our customers as usual. The security aspect could not be ignored. Now we realize: "Online" enables efficient and flexible collaboration, which I see as a great opportunity for the future.

In today's business world it is important to show flexibility and to take innovative paths. In concrete terms, this means that I open up alternative sales channels to present our service portfolio to my contacts in a digital way. Digitization and social selling was not a foreign word to me, but actively using them was a challenge. Thanks to the great webinar organized by Swissmem, I am going into the future stronger. It simply takes different channels for our customers to find the right solution partner!

We work in client teams to focus entirely on our clients and to maintain a high level of identification with products and projects. We live our values for product development and harmonize agility, quality, costs and speed! A good team spirit also helps here. If there is also a common understanding of values with our customers, the conditions are ideal for creating innovative products together.

As a mother of two children, I really appreciate the fact that I can take on many exciting and challenging tasks at Steinel Solutions on a part-time basis with job sharing. In 2013 I started with a full-time workload at Steinel Solutions and only reduced it later. That's why my role has been constantly changing and renewing over the past few years - I think that's great! I feel part of the team and enjoy coming to work.

We live in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world - the so-called VUCA world - with new opportunities and risks. These are more diverse, dynamic and networked than ever before and can arrive without much lead time. If we are to survive in the future, we must drive, promote and establish the digital transformation together with our partners and the entire STEINEL Group. This is a challenge - namely to set up the complex system both sustainably and successfully - and one I am happy to accept!

We do not buy parts indiscriminately. We buy the desired item at the best possible date and of course at the best price! Because we work in customer teams, we identify strongly with the customers assigned to us and their products. Our goal is to satisfy them with adherence to delivery dates, quality and competitively priced products. My tasks are very diversified and international, because besides suppliers from China we work intensively with local suppliers and distributors from Switzerland. The specific sourcing services for the benefit of the STEINEL Group round off my everyday work.

As a contact person in the area of customer-specific sensor technology for lighting & sanitary manufacturers such as building automation, I and my team are jointly responsible for the course of the project from innovative start-up to world market leader. The work is enormously exciting and complex, I am always at the pulse of time and sensor technology is no longer just sensor technology, but an intelligent and networked system consisting of different components, which must harmonize with each other without interference. Internet of Things has been with us for years in a wide variety of applications. I am convinced that I can present an exciting and innovative use case for each of my customers. Because almost every product can and will have to be transferred to the world of IoT in the future.

One of our competences at the Einsiedeln site is the mechanical development of plastic parts. Using the latest technologies such as 3D-CAD, we design housing parts for products according to the requirements of our customers. We also print the prototypes in-house and carry out the first tests such as drop tests IP test. As a OneStopShop specialist, we also do the tool making plastic injection moulding and industrialise the product! Thanks to our OEM products, my working day varies a lot. This makes my job in mechanical development more exciting, because every product and project is customer-specific and always challenges me anew.

We are committed to the highest quality every day and try to achieve it in the best possible way. Quality is no coincidence, which is why we comply with the quality standard DIN EN ISO 9001:2015 and the international environmental management standard ISO 14001:2015. Be it in terms of customer service, quality assurance or quality management, we in the quality department are constantly optimising in all areas. Our LEAN professionals are constantly developing new, creative approaches to reduce waste of all kinds - be it time, material or route. This optimizes internal processes in favor of process and product costs - so our customers also benefit.

Digitisation in incoming goods and modern industry means that components can be traced back to the manufacturer - and at Steinel Solutions we ensure this with the MODI Trace system! The scanning of manufacturer-specific labels and codes enables the shortest cycle times and leads to the highest reading accuracy, eliminating the risk of incorrect placement through visual checks and manual entries in incoming goods. All read information is assigned to an individualized, unique label that can be further processed by the production systems, thus enabling traceability to the components installed.

STEINEL stands for sensor technology. And STEINEL Solutions also stands for sensor technology. As a sensor pioneer, we deal with a wide variety of sensor technologies every day. After all, the future will be shaped more and more by sensor technology and networking. It's not just the sensor itself that decides on good and reliable values, but the harmony of signal acquisition, conditioning and processing. The interplay between hardware and firmware is concentrated in the hands of the developer, who understands the system as a whole and can therefore tailor the product exactly to the customer's needs.

I have very fond memories of my four-year training as an electronics engineer at Steinel Solutions. What I found particularly cool was that we were several trainees in the vocational training programme and that we were able to work on our own projects as a team, which brought a lot of variety into the developer's everyday life. Thanks to the competent support, this practical application brought me a lot for my future and I learned a lot. In the company we also gained insight into other areas, especially into electronics production, which rounded off my training.

We train young talents to become professionals in electronics and design. In the last ten years alone, we have accompanied more than 20 apprentices on their way into the working world. As an SME, I think we are a model training center in our industry and in Canton Schwyz, because in addition to their field of specialization, they also get extremely exciting insights into manufacturing and product development and can participate in cool projects that are used throughout the company!

«If you don't move forward you begin to move backward!» - We have lived by this motto for many years. Constantly searching for innovative, future-oriented and sustainable solutions in the field of supply chain & procurement, we design new, transparent supply chains, especially in the age of digitalization. This enables us not only to operate efficiently and in a target-oriented manner, but also to react in a forward-looking manner to possible risks. With our reliable, long-term partners and a great team, even emerging turbulences are quickly absorbed.

Thanks to BOM Connector, we are able to provide our customers and prospects with quotes for component assembly much more quickly and efficiently. At the same time, obsolescence and alternative management take on a whole new dimension. What was previously only possible through manual work is now done professionally and highly automated by the newly introduced software. This gives us the opportunity to concentrate on the A-parts and to develop market advantages for us and our customers' products. Digitalization increases our performance and our added value for existing and new customers. At the same time it underlines our top positioning in the industry.

I have been working as a design engineer at STEINEL Solutions for 12 years now. In the OEM environment in which we operate, I am involved in projects ranging from feasibility analyses to series production and design, among other things, housing parts for sensors or create operating equipment. My job in this diverse environment is very varied and challenging, as new things like robotics and other automation technologies are becoming more and more common. Thanks to my many years of experience and the know-how I have acquired, I was given the opportunity at the beginning of the year to take on the position of head of construction. Thanks to the Swissmem vocational trainer course, I am now able to train apprentices, pass on my knowledge and support the next generation.

At our Einsiedeln site we have many years of experience with New Product Introduction. Our expertise in the areas of prototype construction of electronics, mechanics and plastics, test and equipment design as well as IP protection and EMC pre-testing enables us to seamlessly transfer our customers' products into series production and to make this as efficient, high-quality and flexible as possible. Likewise, since we offer all this in Einsiedeln, we can respond flexibly and at short notice to product changes and fluctuations in demand. Our NPI team is renowned for flexibility and time-to-market. For me this means coordinating with all important internal interfaces and overcoming new hurdles every day!

The PCB is the heart of the electronics hardware world. In order for it to be manufactured, a functioning PCB design is needed, which is laid out with the most modern tools. Housing space conditions, EMC interference, layer structure, routing, production suitability and other issues are the major challenges that have to be overcome. The demands of our customer-specific OEM products and projects challenge me again and again and make my job varied, because it is my task to dutifully implement all rules and standards and to create a functioning PCB design so that the PCB is suitable for production and thus leads the product to success.

Personnel development and promotion of employees is a constant mission of every company. But this alone is not enough. It requires employees who communicate their needs, are open to change and are willing to learn new things. We are therefore especially proud that Florian, Erich and Jim remain loyal to us as employees and take their next step in their development with us! The internal castling between sales, project management, technical office and production is a win-win situation for everyone - using strengths correctly, maintaining know-how, promoting and developing employees.

Working for STEINEL Solutions as a project manager is an exciting challenge. The fact that we work with many customers and suppliers all over the world results in many interesting contacts and you come into contact with a wide variety of cultures. Getting to know the various software tools used by customers to map their processes is also instructive. Depending on the customer, these tools are either pure information platforms for us as a partner or tools that we use to map our deliverables directly. Since we are located in Europe between Asia and the USA, we contact Asia in the morning and the USA in the afternoon. This allows us to focus on each one individually. We are looking forward to meeting the customers again personally after Corona and to getting to know them further.

Project management in the OEM customer environment basically already places high demands on the organization, the processes and the team - and I, as the project manager, am the linchpin. Acting in parallel with several stakeholders and coordinating target costs, time to market and coordinating tasks that are complex and internationally interlinked makes my job extremely exciting and interesting. Personally, it is important to me to take the perspective of our customers and their product users. This is the focus and should be optimally supported by us, from feasibility to realization and start of production of the product. Being a project manager means being an entrepreneur. One is - even if only for a limited time - the "manager" of a project.

In our internal sales function, we do much more than the same purely administrative tasks day in and day out. We respond to the needs of our external and internal customers and contacts on a daily basis. Our hub function covers communication with our customers in the area of inquiries, orders, confirmations and planning, and we are also responsible for ensuring that the appropriate shipping documents are ready for goods to be shipped and that they arrive on time. We operate in different cultures as well as in different languages, which makes our work very diverse and exciting.