Sven - R&D Engineer

“Quality is the priority and this is an excellent way of working.”

As a newcomer to the labour market, I started at Houdijk as a Draughtsman/Structural Engineer in the Mechanical Engineering department. By starting in this position, checking the technical drawings and working out the details, you learn a great deal about Houdijk’s techniques, which allows you to develop a comprehensive and solid technical background. I became familiar with the engineering fairly quickly and became a Structural Engineer, and I am now part of the fairly new R&D department. There is always a demand for innovation from the market, but during the implementation of a project there is often insufficient time to work on that. That is why the R&D department was created.

Every day, we keep each other in the project groups closely informed on the state of affairs. At R&D, we concentrate on new developments and devise new solutions that have not been used previously. Many of these ideas come from Sales or from Bart Houdijk. We investigate where the challenges lie to ultimately develop a new system for our customers. An example of such a challenge is the Capper™, a popular machine that makes sandwich products. A well-known sandwich product is the Oreo biscuit. To stay competitive, the speed of this machine had to be increased. Based on this need, we have developed a new machine that seems to work well. We are going to introduce this machine on the Stock Exchange. This new Capper™ is a good example of an R&D project.

Houdijk is an good employer that offers many opportunities. The focus is on developing high-tech machines rather than on the time or cost of this development. Quality is the priority and this is an excellent way of working.