People Behind sbi - What is Your Role?
Who is sbi?
Our company is shaped by its people.
Many different roles and perspectives contribute to how we work every day.
In this interview series, we give you a glimpse behind the scenes and the opportunity to get to know some of the people who help build sbi. We sat down with colleagues from different departments across the company and asked them a few simple questions about their work, their routines, and what they enjoy most about their roles.
What we got are their short, honest answers and real perspectives. Each blog post focuses on one question (accompanied by video) to give you an authentic look at life at sbi.
Dive in and read their answers below, or watch the full video!
What does a typical day at sbi look like?
“What is your role?” and “What does a typical day look like?” are often the first questions people ask when they’re curious about a company or a specific position.
In this first blog post of our interview series, five colleagues share how their days at sbi typically unfold. From meetings and lab work to problem-solving and nurturing collaborations. Their answers show just how diverse working at sbi can be.
Meet:
- Liesa Pötschke, Senior Research Scientist
- Bernd Leuchtle, Senior Application Scientist
- Louisa Kauth, Head of Application Science
- Marc Vonhoegen, Vice President Finance & Taxation
- Sayantan Dutta, Head of Production
... and see how their days at sbi look like!
Liesa Pötschke, Senior Research Scientist:
My goal is to evaluate and help develop our products. Sensors, actuators and the DOTS Software.
What I do is, I collect the data that we need to get our products where we want them to be and also to develop the requirements. Because sometimes we think we want the sensors and whatever to be there (at a certain level *editors note) and what they should be able to do to perform.
But then we learn a lot of stuff from our customers via Appsci and Sales and sometimes our requirements are not the same as the customers' requirements and that's also a gap that we have to bridge here.
So sometimes I do tests for customers or for potential customers, projects with third party devices that we may integrate.
That's what I do.
Bernd Leuchtle, Senior Application Scientist:
I'm an Application Scientist, so part of Sales and doing everything to help Sales as much as possible without actually selling something. That means my day is, well, never the same and you never know exactly how it looks like.
That can be lots of calls, that can be internal or external calls with customers, that can be interpreting data, looking at data from customers, solving an issue, going to the lab, something like that.
Most often, when I try to have one standard day, it is starting with emails, see what came in from yesterday, what is important now to answer. Then going through data, doing yeah, some interpretation, doing some analysis.
In the late morning, early afternoon there is most often the customer calls because they are most often interested in having the call around lunch, the hour before the two hours afterwards. Then in the later afternoon, calls with colleagues and, in between whenever something comes in, of course I jump into that because whenever the customer calls that's the most important thing to answer.
Louisa Kauth, Head of Application Science:
I usually start with a coffee at my desk, going through my emails and plan the tasks for for the day. I mean we, as application science team, are mainly responsible for taking care of customers, customer technical questions, finding a solution for them when they reach out.
But we are also planning the trials all around our equipment and doing some projects with them.
And I, as a head of application science, are mainly responsible for managing my team, for having an overview about all their tasks, for giving the support that they need and thus, I'm a lot in internal alignment, discussing with my team but also cross-functional with other teams to have a good communication with everyone.
And then I'm also part of customer meetings, scoping some projects, finding nice cases where we can implement our devices to and then, in the end, having good data that we can share.
Marc Vonhoegen, Vice President Finance & Taxation:
So my daily work is, I am responsible for the accounting, the monthly, quarterly and annual financial statements, tax declarations, contract adjustments and some kind of HR. That's my job.
I'm also responsible for the completely financial stuff for the German entity, for the American entity and in the end I just combine the two packages into a consolidated pack and send it over to our mother company.
I'm also responsible for the German audit and support the US audit which is, to be honest, not the favorite part of my job.
Sayantan Dutta, Head of Production:
As I'm a part of this company since the beginning. It's been 10 years now for me at Aquila Biolabs. I've been growing with the company and in the beginning, I just used to do the production of the sensors. Now I'm taking care of production, manufacturing, order processing, logistics. And me and my team build everything that goes to all our customers.
And therefore, every day is not that well routined out or organized because plans always change.
But in the beginning, it's having a five minute meeting with the team, discussing what needs to be done today and then executing production orders, contacting customers, when they want to get their products, shipping things, and just simple engineering every day.