ISLET­TER HIGH­LIGHT: Janne Nahkuri, ABB

THROUGH ISLET BINOC­U­LARS: JANNE NAHKURI, SAP APPLI­CA­TION OWN­ER, ABB

We live in Helsin­ki with my wife and dog. We have a grown-up son study­ing in Turku. In my spare time I exer­cise a lot out­doors with our dog.

What kind of orga­ni­za­tion do you work for and what is your role there?

I work for ABB Dri­ves unit which man­u­fac­tures AC dri­ves (vari­able fre­quen­cy dri­ves). ABB Dri­ves employs approx­i­mate­ly 1300 peo­ple in Fin­land and approx­i­mate­ly 6000 glob­al­ly. We oper­ate in 80 coun­tries. The Finnish Dri­ves unit co-oper­ates close­ly in SAP devel­op­ment i.e. with US, Ger­man and Sin­ga­pore. I work as SAP Appli­ca­tion Own­er and are in charge of SAP oper­a­tions and orga­niz­ing SAP devel­op­ment at Dri­ves in Finland.

Recent­ly, Dri­ves unit and Motors and Gen­er­a­tors unit were merged into a new Motion Busi­ness Unit. The fusion nat­u­ral­ly serves the big pic­ture. The AC dri­ves man­u­fac­tured by Dri­ves unit are used to con­trol the rota­tion­al speed of the elec­tric motors pro­duced by Motors unit which can cut the engine’s pow­er con­sump­tion by up to 50 percent.

To which direc­tion is your field developing?

We are liv­ing excit­ing times as elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion is increas­ing and yet at the same time emis­sions should be cut. As much as one third of the world’s elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion is spent to run elec­tric motors. Huge sav­ings can be achieved by using AC dri­ves. This is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for both ABB and the whole man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try. In 2015, ABB Dri­ves’ AC dri­ve pool saved 490 TWh of elec­tric­i­ty glob­al­ly, equiv­a­lent to elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion of 120 mil­lion house­holds and pre­vent­ed 410 mil­lion tons of CO2 emis­sions. This is equiv­a­lent to the annu­al emis­sions of 90 mil­lion pas­sen­ger cars.

What is your organization’s key mes­sage to its stake­hold­ers and customers?

The cus­tomer and qual­i­ty are at the heart of all activ­i­ties. ABB makes huge invest­ments in qual­i­ty. For exam­ple, employ­ee train­ing empha­sizes Lean Six Sig­ma train­ing. Qual­i­ty man­age­ment, sys­tem­at­ic con­tin­u­ous strate­gic devel­op­ment and improve­ment of prod­ucts, ser­vices and process­es are essen­tial part of our busi­ness. Respon­si­bil­i­ty is also one of the ABB-wide val­ues and it is strong­ly empha­sized right from the start when a new per­son starts at ABB.

How does your orga­ni­za­tion retain top tal­ents and what makes your orga­ni­za­tion a great place to work?

ABB offers respon­si­bil­i­ty but is also sup­port­ive. The indus­try is inter­est­ing and live­ly. There is con­stant evo­lu­tion going on. Inter­est­ing and chal­leng­ing tasks can always be found in-house and there is a strong focus on improv­ing one’s skills.

What is the best part of your work?

The extent of my field makes this role inter­est­ing. When you work with SAP, things are fluc­tu­at­ing and there are chal­lenges every day. You con­stant­ly learn new things. I have now worked for this com­pa­ny for about 1,5 years and there is still a huge amount of new things to learn what is moti­vat­ing. Even though I am work­ing in IT, and what is so spe­cial about it, is that the prac­ti­cal work and pro­duc­tion are in the same build­ing hence you see in prac­tice what for SAP is being devel­oped. It is not all just trans­ac­tions and cod­ing, but the work becomes con­crete when being close to the production.

How would you describe the part­ner­ship with ISLET?

The coop­er­a­tion with ISLET has always worked well. I have been coop­er­at­ing long time with ISLET also in my pre­vi­ous role and I have always been pleased with our col­lab­o­ra­tion. Islet­ters are capa­ble and open-mind­ed peo­ple with whom it’s easy to work together.

Mot­to

Mea­sure twice, cut once.

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