Career at Eqraft
Eqraft is a company with an open and flat organizational structure: young engineers are given the chance to grow along with the company, and taking responsibility from the get-go is part of the job. Two members of the Eqraft engineering team tell us about their experiences.
It goes without saying that, for Eqraft, the engineering department is crucial: both the sales engineers, who make a rough plan before the complete outline is designed, and the members of the engineering team, who design and draw the machines in detail.
Flying start
The sales engineers combine designing projects with actual sales: they are the link between account managers and engineers. It’s a role that was invented to make communication between these departments run more smoothly and to meet customer’s wishes more accurately. Mike Kooijman (23) was the first to take on this role three years ago. He studied mechatronics in Vlissingen (NL) and immediately began working for Eqraft upon graduation. “Despite my young age, Rutger and Wim gave me a lot of responsibility from the beginning. I received my own projects, and I went to meetings with customers by myself. It made me learn a lot in a short period of time.”
Diversity
When Mike and his colleague sales engineers get a project signed, it moves on to the engineering department, for example to Nico Bredenhoff, senior project engineer. “We fill in all the details: what is the exact type of machine, the desired capacity, the colors?” he explains. “It takes a lot of product knowledge to know exactly what the possibilities are and, of course, it all depends on the customer’s needs and wishes. Sometimes we help the sales engineers along the way, when they’re still in negotiations with the client.” How much time he spends actually engineering depends on the size of a project; for the bigger ones, he often fulfills a project management role instead of designing everything himself. “That means I’m responsible for the planning and also all the interfaces outside of the project scope. Therefore, I also meet with customers and work closely with our partners; I rarely just sit at my desk all day.” Nico works together with a team of ten engineers, so when he is asked to fulfill a coordinating role, he can let them do the engineering. “I enjoy the diversity of this job; it really changes with every project.”
Communication
Mike underscores the same kind of diversity in his job. “I work together with lots of different people – one meeting, I could be talking about screws and pins; the next, about finance and budgets.” The most interesting project he’s involved in is the new MSP factory. “It’s a very innovative project in which we work very closely with the client.” But he also enjoyed visiting the U.S. for projects at Baker & Murakami Produce and Torrey Farms. “Of course, it was amazing to travel to those places and meet the clients in person,” Mike enthuses. Nico agrees: “Face-to-face communication is extremely important; I think that’s underestimated sometimes. Some things are hard to explain over the telephone or in an email, and it’s a more personal way of working.”