Two Austrian plants, one Slovenian plant, three sales offices
Technology budget I hold
€9.1m
2026: €6.4m operations, €2.7m change
A considered point of view.
A shop-floor record is written by someone with a valve in front of them and a shift to finish. If the system asks for a value at the wrong moment, or twice, it will be filled in later from memory, and the record will look complete while proving little. I design from the bench outwards, and I would rather connect fewer things properly than many things that nobody believes.
Selected leadership work / 01
Linking every test certificate to its valve before measuring machine output
In 2022 a district-heating operator reported seat leakage on a batch of our butterfly valves.
I want every valve we ship to carry a record that a customer, an auditor or one of our own engineers can follow without asking a second time.
I am chief information officer of Halvesberg Armaturen, a family-owned maker of butterfly, gate and actuated control valves based in Wels, Upper Austria. We sell to water utilities, district-heating operators and process plants, and about two-thirds of our 2025 revenue of €312 million came from outside Austria. Some 1,480 colleagues work across the Wels machining and test plant, a ductile-iron foundry in Upper Styria, an actuator assembly plant near Celje in Slovenia and three sales offices. I report to the chief executive and lead 58 employees and 14 contractors. My 2026 budget is €9.1 million, of which €2.7 million funds change.
I did not reach IT through the data centre. I began in 2001 as a production planner at a pump maker in Bremen, where one late casting could undo a week's sequence, and I later spent four years at a die-casting plant in Bavaria putting its first execution system onto the lines. That background shapes my questions. Before I approve a screen or an interface, I want to know who will enter the value, at what point in the work, and who later depends on it being right. A system that operators work around produces a confident record of the wrong thing.
Three recent decisions on this site show the practice. I put our pressure-test benches into the shop-floor system before the machine-output dashboards that production wanted first. I closed the permanent remote connections that machine builders had used for years. I opened our supplier portal to 46 suppliers rather than all 640. Each choice cost a colleague something they valued, and I record those costs. Product approval, plant safety and quality release stay with their qualified owners; my responsibility is the systems and data they rely on.
A complaint narrowed to one casting heat
In 2024 a water utility reported a leaking gate valve. Because test results and foundry heat numbers were linked to serial numbers, we identified 38 affected valves within two days. A similar case in 2022 had taken eleven days.
Twenty-seven remote routes reduced to one
A 2024 survey found 27 ways into our plant networks, nine of them unknown to IT. All now pass through a single brokered, logged and time-limited route approved by plant maintenance, at a cost of €540,000 and some lost convenience.
Supplier data from most of the material spend
The first portal phase covered 46 suppliers representing 71 per cent of purchased-material spend. By June 2026, 39 were live, and supplier-specific emissions data covered 52 per cent of that spend, with the remainder estimated by a stated method.
Current focus
I am preparing to replace the Celje plant's assembly-tracking system before its vendor support ends in 2027, and deciding with the plant manager how much of the Wels design should travel to a site with different products and a smaller team.
Conversations I welcome
I am seeking a first supervisory-board seat at an industrial, utility or family-owned company in Austria, Germany or a neighbouring market, with eighteen days a year available once my employer has consented and the company's relationships with Halvesberg have been reviewed.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
Formation
Diploma in industrial engineering and managementTechnische Hochschule Vehrlingen · 2001
Supervisory-board preparation programmeVorderwaldt Institute for Board Practice · 2025
Clara tells the supervisory board what a control does not cover before we think to ask. When she closed the machine builders' connections, she warned us a night repair might take longer. When it did, she came back to explain the gap and the fix.
Irmgard ZellhoferChair of the supervisory board, Halvesberg Armaturen GmbHThe full record ↗
Contact
I am seeking a first supervisory-board seat at an industrial, utility or family-owned company in Austria, Germany or a neighbouring market, with eighteen days a year available once my employer has consented and the company's relationships with Halvesberg have been reviewed.
