High voltage takes center stage in this brand new season of Hitachi Energy's Power Pulse podcast. We promise to bring you great content from the brightest minds in the business. We'll discuss challenges, opportunities, and all the hot topics any high voltage enthusiasts or anyone interested in sustainability for that matter, is sure to enjoy. In this episode of the podcast, we'll tell you about all the bits and bobs that make up high voltage equipment.
Our guest is Dirk Uhde, the Global Head of Operations and Health and Safety. Dirk holds a master's degree in electrical engineering and an MBA. We felt he would make a particularly good contribution to this topic because his career has been so varied. He's worked in R&D, quality, product management and sales.
If he had to choose a favorite area of work, though, he would freely tell you his heart is in operations aka making sure the thousands of daily tasks carried out on the shop floor are executed seamlessly. Welcome back to Power Pulse. I'm your host, Sam Dash, and today I'm speaking with Dirk Uhde, Head of Operations for High Voltage. Hi, Dirk. Hi, Sam. So, Dirk, I first have to ask, is it true that you ran a 5K in 15 minutes? That is extremely fast.
It feels fitting that you work in energy, I guess. Is that right? It's kind of embarrassing because, yes, I did, but it's so long ago that I, that I kind of when I start, would try to do it right now, I think I would need to double of time. Yeah, yeah. People expect you to still perform in that way now, right? Yeah. But, you know, you don't. And kinda age doesn't help either, I think. But, see, the story is, and just to give you a quick background of how this happened is, I was 16.
I was living in the U.S. preparing for my senior high school year, going to try to enroll for fall sports. And I had a choice between making football and basically cross-country. And so I said, well, let's take cross-country, I mean, running, everyone can do a little of running.
So and I just didn't really figure out that they would run seven days a week, so, it kind of fall into this and then continued back when I was back in Germany to my hometown, and when I was 19, I did the I did 15, 19, 20. I did 15 minutes for 5 K and a kind of 32 minutes for 10 K. And do you still run today? Not not as much, but you still run for pleasure? For pleasure I, I try not to look too much at, the time when I run, because that gives me some frustration. Yes. Some anxiety.
Yeah. For sure. So from Germany to France to Brazil. Can you tell us a bit about your career trajectory and how you came to be at Hitachi Energy? So I've been in this high voltage somehow business for all of my life. It was a choice. I did high voltage engineering at the beginning, and I started right after studies in the high voltage business, was in power transformers, was in at that time. So I'm German native.
I worked out of France, started in R&D and then moved after 4 or 5 years, to Brazil again. I started my operational career, kind of, if you would. Yeah. And what age was that at? So Brazil. I was 30, so. Yeah, I was, you know, was still in my early career. Yeah. I went to Brazil, did a lot of operations, learned a lot. and then I, you know, my career just brought me moving around Europe, North America, different products, different people, different cultures.
It's just very rich. Yeah, it was very rich. Did you enjoy? I get the sense you did, but did you enjoy all that moving around? Did you find it sort of invigorating to be in all those different communities and settings? I think I wanted it, this is what I needed or I felt I it was giving me the pleasure to move to see certain things and I feel also it's a, it's an additional learning on top of the technical learning because you really see how people look at things differently.
You learn about diversity, you learn about the added value of people having different opinions. Yeah, I can imagine that that's a real asset to your work here at Hitachi Energy. So Hitachi Energy has this great international culture where you work with people around the table from any cultural background, from any work part of the country with different ideas.
And this is what brings the richness of what we are doing right now, because someone will come up with an idea that you have never figured out. That brings me actually to a question I want to get into about your work here at High Voltage. So you're the head of operations. How would you explain how Hitachi Energy assembles a product and delivers it to the customer? Where does it all start? Good question.
Well, see, it starts all with our customer demand and we need to get our customer demand and translate it into our planning process. So this is what we call let’s say it’s an operational planning process. It's kind of where you look into your crystal ball and you will see what will be the customer demand, not only the one we know, but the one we don't know. And you translate this into your planning process. So this is the beginning. Then it gives us a huge amount of information.
It gives us just tremendous amount of information that we need to process. And here it it comes where we use some tools. We use what we call the, an ERP. It's an Enterprise Resource Planning software that is basically our backbone operational tool that we use to plan our operations from planning, manufacturing, quality, finance, delivery. Everything is used in this tool, which really is our backbone. How long has that been in use? How long has that been something that you rely on that tool?
So the tool has been in use for many years. That’s something that exists in the industry, but we are now taking a tremendous step where we say we are harmonizing all those tools around the company, and that's a great asset because this means we all will work very similar ways. We can exchange data. We talk the same software language if you want. Right. In terms of terminology, I want to ask you about a term that I've heard recently. Can you explain to me what the feeder factory model is?
So feeder factory is, let me explain. Let me just go a step back. So we have our customers and our customers rely on us, that we understand their needs, and we translate what they need into our solutions that we will provide to them. And this means we need to be very close to our customers, not only from understanding that, but also we want to be close to them in a geographical point of view. And we do this in what we call our operating units, the ones that are close to the factory.
And then we need to have our internal specialists that are excelling in operational tasks. So this is what we call our feeder factory. So our feeder factories, they’re a little in the, in the back office of our operations. They assemble modules. So– What is a module? It is, take the car industry. So you want to buy a car. You get a car which is very customized. But in the car, you have the engine or maybe the dashboard. And this is something which for us we would do in a feeder factory.
So we would take our heart of it, our modules, and we would do them in a specialized manufacturing plant that will be, focusing 200% on quality, on on-time delivery, on efficiency and controlling all the processes because they do all the volumes. They do this every day in and out. They do this and then we ship it to our, close to the customer factories, say we'll customize it and make sure it fully is aligned with our customer expectation.
And so I was going to ask you about distance and shipping as well in relation to feeder factories. Can you talk about the importance of where feeder factories are built and the relationship in terms of distance between feeder factories and the client? Yeah, so we have a global network and looking into it, I think we need to understand complexity of what we do. And if we have a complex product, it will be made out of 10,000 different individual parts.
Right. That's vast. And those 10,000 parts will come from several hundreds of different vendor suppliers. Right. So logistics in general is one of the challenges that we have to overcome. And then we will bring it into one of our feeder factories that will do those, what I, you know what we call module – the different parts that we preassemble and then ship to the final factories. They can sit everywhere around the world.
The criteria is really, we need to have the best expert specialist in the world to do the job. They, so they need to have the expertise, they need to have the knowledge. Yeah, is it hard to find those experts to work in those feeder factories? Not really, because it's such an exciting and interesting job that people like to work there because they know, first of all, that they work all around the globe for customers all around the globe.
They know that, say, will be really learning the best of the industry ways of working and procedures and quality controls. So when they come, they know they will be the best of the world. That's good. It sounds like a really exciting place to be working. There are many exciting places in our organization where you can work.
I mean, I am passionate about operations, so for me, operations obviously is a place to work, but I think there's many, many places where people feel that they are really making a difference in what they do every day. Yeah. And so in terms of that every day work, I assume safety must be a pretty big part of the operations you oversee. How do you implement safety measures across an organization that's so wide, geographically?
And how do you ensure that your suppliers are also following those same safety measures, too? So safety – you're completely right – is the most important thing. Safety is what we call our license to operate. If you don't fulfill safety you're kind of fail on on everything. So the most important thing is that we have our responsibility to make sure every employee that works for us is getting home to his or her beloved ones in a perfect, safe manner every evening.
And that's our first responsibility. Now, how do we make this happen? I think the most important thing is we need to make sure we have standards in place where we know exactly each work step, how is each work step done. And we look into each of those work steps that are defined. We look into how can we optimize them? How can we mitigate any risks. So then how can we find new machines, new tools, and how can we and also look into this daily improvement on our safety.
So you're sort of touching on this already, but I wonder if you can expand on this question I have for you, which is, you know, over the course of your career, you've continued to reinvest in your work and found things that excite you. What is the most exciting thing for you about the job right now? What's causing you to reinvest at this moment? The question is, why do you have always this passion?
And most important thing about this passion is, is the people, the environment you work in and the people you work with. It comes back to what we said before that the richness of having so many different people with different backgrounds, with different ideas and so much you can learn out of it. It's a daily learning experience, the job we do. So that makes it, for me, one of the most valuable experiences. But on top of it, why I like operations.
It's also because, you know, you need to focus in, focus out every day. I might go on to the shop floor looking to how can we improve for efficiency on what we do. And two hours later, I will look into a big strategic, decision on how can we make sure we have enough capacity in three years. So it's focus in, focus on it. You never lose the contact to the ground. And that's so important because this is where you get all the feedback.
This is where you always test your ideas and you get so many good suggestions from people that work with the working operations every day, in and out. You just ask them and you get tons of tons of new ideas. Yeah, it really sounds like collaboration is at the heart of what you do. Absolutely. It's collaboration within like operations, but also around all the organizations.
So we will look into also, you know, customers, listen to our customers, listen to people that know something more about than us and, about supply chain or any other field you can you can imagine. So Hitachi Energy says that it places sustainability at its core. Can you share some sustainability initiatives or practices that are currently being implemented within operations at High Voltage?
Sure. see, sustainability is important for Hitachi, but it's also important for me personally, I feel working in Hitachi, I can kind of link my personal conviction with the company policy on sustainability, and that's something I really feel valuable, for me personally, that I can go and can go home and talk about what we do. So we want to decarbonize operations. That's one of my things where I look into how can we decarbonize what we do. We want to generate our own electricity.
We can install solar panels. We want to reduce waste. We want to make sure we recycle. We want to make sure we are not generating any more waste, CO2, any emissions than we need. And maybe, you know, that might sound a little general. I can give you a couple of examples. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a great goal. I'm curious as to what you're sort of implementing on the factory level to achieve that. So first, one of the things we want to do is reduce packing.
Packing is something where we have to pack things, we ship it, it needs to be stable. We have now, we move from packing in wood to packing in cardboard. Cardboard is the most environmental friendly packing that exists. So we're moving from one to another. For those of us not so familiar with the various carbon footprints of these materials, can you say more about why cardboard is more eco-friendly than wood? Yeah, cardboard is using basically a small quantity of wood to be produced.
And so with the same amount of initial raw material, you can just produce about ten, twenty times the same amount of packing material. Well, yeah. So bigger impact for the same amount of raw material. Correct. Yeah. And other thing is, like in our private life where we move to electrical vehicles, you know, factories, we're stopping all forklifts that we use to move material around which were gas powered to use only electrical forklifts.
So again, something that we do to make sure we are reducing our carbon emissions. And then when we can, we obviously want to power them with our own produced energy. And do you get the sense that this is the sort of initiative that is across the industry? Do you get a sense of where Hitachi Energy lies in the larger landscape in terms of sustainability at the factory level? I think sustainability is something that a lot of industries are pursuing right now.
And I think it's right because it's very important. So I think there's two things. The first is sustainability always needs to start with a policy. You need to have a strong policy in place. It needs to have this push to say we need to generate ideas to become more sustainability. So we, in Hitachi Energy, yes, we do have a strong policy. We are being asked to think out of the box every day to find ideas; how can we make our operations more sustainable.
So this is where I think the company culture is very important. On the other hand, we still want to look what others do because we're not in a competition with anyone. We want to all work towards the same goal, which is making the world more sustainable. So doing something that another one is doing and copying it, that's a very good thing to do because we are all independent. If we might be competitors in different industries, we all can learn working for the same goal.
Yeah, and sort of learn from each other's successes and mistakes, I'm sure. Absolutely. Dirk, thanks so much for joining us today It was a real pleasure. You've given us a great macro and micro view of operations at High Voltage. And thanks for tuning in to this episode of Power Pulse. Until next time. And that's it for today. We'll be back soon with some more great content. But, before you go, remember to give us a follow so you don't miss an episode. Thanks for tuning in. See you soon!
This episode was brought to you by Hitachi Energy. Created and introduced by Bárbara Freitas-Daniels. Content and script writing by Cassandra Inay. Guest speaker Dirk Uhde. Hosted by Sam Dash. Produced and edited by Creative Chimps.