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.
