Building blocks of the future

Over 55 years’ experience and expertise in steering systems:

the many faces of thyssenkrupp Presta Mülheim GmbH.

Professional fulfillment at thyssenkrupp

Around 300 people are currently employed here, working hard day by day to promote the international success of the Group. One of them is Ukrainian-born Ganna Schütze. She joined us in 2007, initially as a production engineer for sensor shaft assembly and production planning, taking on the role of project manager seven years later. With her seven-strong interdisciplinary project team, she is now lead engineer responsible for planning sensor shaft assembly lines at new thyssenkrupp sites around the world. After Schönebeck on the Elbe, she moved to Changzhou in China in 2014 for her first foreign assignment as project manager. Heading up a whole new team on a greenfield site 250 kilometers from Shanghai, she was responsible for the entire planning of assembly lines making sensor shafts for power steering systems. Further sites in Mexico and Hungary were to follow. “I’m very grateful to be able to work here because I’ve been given every opportunity to fulfill myself professionally,” says Ganna Schütze. “Even when I said I wanted to do a distance learning degree in industrial engineering, it was no problem.”

Detective work for optimum quality

Skilled and motivated employees are the building blocks of sustainable growth. Another good example is Thomas Schulz, who started his career 19 years ago as an industrial electronics apprentice at thyssenkrupp Presta Mülheim GmbH – then still Mercedes Benz Lenkungen GmbH. Today when quality management issues need attention, Thomas Schulz is the man to call. Whether in the area of supplier support or internal production processes, he carries out detective work, eliminating sources of malfunction, to optimize quality. The technical skills he learnt in his apprenticeship are an advantage to him here: when he can’t get to the bottom of a problem from his desk, he visits suppliers at their sites. But to save travel expenses and protect the environment, Smart Glasses with an integrated display, camera and speaker are used to diagnose faults or carry out production approvals.

On the production line

To search out errors in the own assembly processes he leads an interdisciplinary team but also goes back to the production line and meets up with people he used to work with there. Irabor Odijie and his colleagues who get through a huge amount of work on the production line, assembling steering gear units for the auto industry. Working in rotation along the line’s 42 stations installing parts and performing tests, they produce 750 steering gears in a single shift, one every 30 seconds.

Everyone performs the tasks with full concentration and precision. Mistakes have to be avoided to get the quality right. Irabor Odijie, who came to thyssenkrupp Presta Mülheim GmbH in 2017, completed an apprenticeship as an automotive mechanic in his native Nigeria in Africa, which he later supplemented in Germany with a qualification as a mechatronics technician. “I’m really happy to be here, because I can learn something new here every day,” says the 48-year-old. “Also I like the working atmosphere here, everyone is really collegial and there’s no discrimination!”