From Submarine to Airplane

Hello, my name is Marcel Richter. I began working as a production manager in the Compounding Center Walterhausen in February of 2018. In addition to my job, I like to explore the Eisenach area with my wife and my three year-old son; soon, our family will be growing once again. Alongside that I like strength and endurance training, enjoy hiking, play squash and read technical literature.

In this blog post, I’d like  to give you a look at the work and life of a production manager at Continental –my everyday life.

I am a trained chemical and technical assistant, and I studied process engineering. Before joining Continental I worked most recently at a mining company as a deputy production manager. Compounding was a totally new division for me. It’s almost like I moved from a submarine to an airplane. Nevertheless, I was successful in getting started in rubber manufacturing.

The unique thing about working for Continental is that my area poses new challenges every day. My job is to find and implement the best solution quickly all the time, engage in intensive collaboration and be able to react to new situations. You need to be assertive to some extent to do so and a good understanding of what makes people tick.

I feel that the biggest challenge in my area is our need to increase efficiency to handle cost pressures in production and increasing customer demands. Our job is to continuously explore potential areas of improvement, illuminate weak points and implement better solutions. Everyone on the team needs to play their part. I see us in a balancing act between time, cost, quality and innovation and we have to learn to handle it.

For the rest of the year I will be dealing with different projects, with the largest construction project being the eighth mixer line with new mixing technology and improved ergonomic workstation design. The second and larger project is the new warehouse. It will optimize loading with truck ports, reducing downtimes and speeding up loading overall. Both of these measures will help increase capacity. The topic of automation is becoming more and more important. Using driverless transportation systems has allowed us to continue improving logistics processes in production.

The different projects and challenges my job poses add excitement and variety to my workflow. Continental’s pleasant working atmosphere and extensive continued training opportunities make the company an attractive employer for me.

This article was written by our employee.