Clara VossChief Information Officer

Personal correspondence

The record that travels with every valve

Chief Information Officer Europe

I connect the valve on the test bench to the record a customer, an auditor or a plant engineer later has to rely on.

The first planning system I trusted was a magnetic board in the production office of Ostrinder Pumpenbau in Bremen. I joined in September 2001, three months after completing a diploma in industrial engineering and management at Technische Hochschule Vehrlingen. The company built centrifugal pumps for ships and waterworks, and my job was to sequence machining orders around castings that did not always arrive when the purchasing system said they would. The board was crude, but everyone in the room could see it and everyone corrected it. The planning module on the screen beside it was more precise and much less believed.

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.

Company revenue
€312m
2025; about two-thirds outside Austria
Colleagues across four countries
1,480
Two Austrian plants, one Slovenian plant, three sales offices
Technology budget I hold
€9.1m
2026: €6.4m operations, €2.7m change

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 GmbH
The 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.

  • Board appointments
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