Cihan Ünver has made a career at the Mixing Facility in Weinheim. He has worked there almost 10 years, first as an operator producing mixtures and then as a machine technician after taking part-time training courses. Today he works on process technology, on the automation and digitalization of the Mixing Facility.
“It was not an easy time for me,”, Ünver said, looking back at the two-and-a-half years when he continued his education in night classes to become a machine technician. He had been working in mixing operations. Then his supervisors gave his career plans a boost: They let him switch from a three-shift rotation to one shift. Then, as the work on his trainee thesis loomed, Ünver took a big step transferring from the shop floor to his current job in process technology in the facility’s administrative offices.
“It was absolutely the right path. In retrospect, I should’ve done it much earlier,” he said. “But better late than never.” When he speaks with his old coworkers from that time, they always praise his courage, ambition and determination. They appreciate what he has accomplished.
Many Positive Changes
Ünver started out with training to become a mechatronics technician at Freudenberg in 2005. But he was unable to procure a firm employment contract at first due to the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. He went back to school and “built” a vocational diploma with a concentration in electrical engineering. He describes his attitude as “no pain, no gain.” It led him to choose the abbreviated, one-year “turbo version” for the advanced technical certificate. The rationale was “to avoid wasting time.” The same instruction could have been completed at a much easier pace in two years.
At that point, he could have resumed his studies since slots for him had already been approved. But Ünver decided to try again at Freudenberg and began work as an employee in the mixing facility. Then, in his new role, he experienced firsthand what is still a dominant issue in his work today: ergonomic improvements, plus the automation and digitalization of material production on the road to becoming a forklift-free factory. “A lot has changed for the good over the years,” he said, citing vacuum suction lifting devices as an example. They make handling heavy rubber bales far easier.
Forklift-Free
Ünver is also happy to talk about the computer-controlled weighing system that automatically weighs and doses “ingredients” at the Weinheim mixing plant. It makes the work easier physically and keeps dust out of the plant’s air. He had also dealt with automatic small component weighing technology in great depth in his training thesis.
Today, when pallets loaded with raw material are transported to the production lines or weighing stations, they don’t arrive by forklift. Two driverless floor conveyor vehicles, known as “autonomous mobile robots,” or AMRs, do the work. Operators no longer have to drive around the shop floor making deliveries. In his new job, Ünver played a major role in the introduction of the new AMRs. He says he took a “learning by doing” approach in developing the necessary programming knowledge. Ünver and his Mixing Facility team are now preparing another, even more agile “smart AMR” for its operations – primarily for the warehouse at first.
Ünver draws tremendous satisfaction from his responsibilities. “Work is fun for me. I’m always learning something new.” Rather reserved and modest, he prefers not to look too far ahead into his professional future. But he can imagine assuming a leadership role at some point. “I’m still young, and I have goals and a lot of strengths that I can tap into.”
He displays some of these strengths in sports in his free time. He also gets in at least 10,000 steps a day and regularly works out at a gym.
New Series: People like You and Me
In our new series, we give colleagues in different roles on shop floor a chance to tell their stories. In the current edition, we introduce Cihan Ünver, who works in the Weinheim Mixing Facility.
