Summer Power Stories

I’m a M.Sc. student from Helsinki and I recently started a six month Service Design Internship at Wärtsilä’s Information Management Technology Office. Outside work I’m finalizing my studies in Aalto University School of Science, focusing on creative sustainability, service design and human media interaction. I’ve also had the chance to put theory into practice with many hands-on course projects and case studies from lean service development to sustainable venture ideation. This summer I made myself a promise to read more (one recent favourite was Linus Torvalds’ autobiography) and play records whenever there’s time.

But then, what is service design? It’s all about creating services that are useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable. The methodology is based on looking at the whole development process through the experience of the users, thus aiming for a solution that effectively meets their needs.

Hello, My name is Kalle Reunanen and I am studying industrial engineering and management at Lappeenranta University of Technology. My studies are nearing their end and currently I am working for Wärtsilä as Master’s thesis worker in the services product management organization, more specifically product marketing. I am located in the Turku office, and I will have a change to travel to other Wärtsilä locations as well during the summer.

My thesis topic is related to customer value creation within after-sales services. The topic is a perfect fit for my studies. I also like the research design because it gives me an opportunity to meet and interview both customers and internal contacts from international locations.  

I have had the opportunity to work for Wärtsilä in various different trainee positions over the years during my school holiday seasons. I first started in the Land and Sea Academy training center located here in Turku as a summer trainee for a few summers. My second position was as a service sales support engineer trainee for South Europe and Africa region. There I spent a total of five summers while studying in the university. In addition, I have done two trips with field services during university winter breaks. First trip was to Bangladesh and the second one to Cameroon, both of which were quite eye opening and interesting.

Seeing a big multinational company from different perspectives has been great for my studies, as it has given a real life context for many often otherwise quite abstract concepts familiar from university lectures and text books. I wish everybody a great summer!

-Kalle

Hi everyone! Once again summer brought along new opportunities to learn new things in different areas. I would say that the most important experience for me this summer most probably was the CIMAC congress (the International Council on Combustion Engines). At the beginning of June, a group of summer trainees from Wärtsilä travelled to Helsinki to work for the congress held in Finlandia Hall for a week.  The congress brought together manufacturers of diesel and gas engines, injectors and turbochargers, ship owners and suppliers. We had lots of tasks to do, but we were also lucky to have the possibility to watch the presentations we were interested in. My responsibilities were the registration and info points.  It was a really fulfilling experience to talk with experts of different world-class companies concerning combustion engines. It is surprising how fluent one’s English becomes after having spoken English for only one week!

Besides my major tasks, I took a little job rotation by working a week with the mechanics of the 10V31SG engine. I appreciate these kinds of opportunities to learn also other perspectives of the work I have done and see what kind of tasks people working here at the lab have.

My next larger project will be the master’s thesis. However, before that there is one last year of studies ahead. I am now heading for Lapland for one week of golf, cycling and relaxing. Then some sharpening of pencils and back to school!

All the best,
-Anna-Stina

Hello,Time goes fast and when I am writing this blog, already almost 75% from my internship has gone. I have experienced quite interesting things and challenges but at the moment everything has gone good. At the moment I am going my third time to Kazakhstan, Aktau. I will be there 30 days and then I can go back to school much more experienced.

I think that you are most interested what I do there and how I use my free time. Well in the morning approximately 7:30 o’clock our driver picks me and other colleagues up. Then we head up to construction site and get ready for the day. My task as a trainee is logistic coordinator and  I help subcontractors with looking up material, supervise that material is handled correctly and make sure that everything is under the qualify that Wärtsilä insists. Of course if subcontractors approach me with other problems I try to find out solution for that with rest of the project team. It is nice to have professionals around when someone like I with small amount of experience don’t always know the solution for the problems. Wärtsilä consists a large amount of different kind of professionals and I can be happy that I have ended to have internship in company like this. Maybe someday I will be also part of this group of people.

When I have free time in work, I like to take a look other tasks that constructing power plant needs. I walk in construction site and try to learn phases what is included in construction. I try to make good questions from our rest of site personal and always they come with a good answer that makes me a little smarter. We have specialists in site for electrical, mechanical and civil engineering and they all are very experienced so you can only imagine how much they know about constructing power plant. I hope that one day I will also know as much as they.

After our day has ended in site our driver comes to pick us up and drive us back to our apartments. After I have cleaned up, I usually walk to grocery store near my apartment. I buy some groceries and will cook myself some delicious food. Sometimes I go with rest of the site team to local restaurant. The food is delicious and consists lot of different kind of foods that you don’t see in Finland. The prices isn’t also bad. And this my usual day in Aktau.

It consists lot of same elements that includes my day in Finland but with little spice :)

Thank you for reading and I hope that you have enjoyed your time where ever you are

-Tuomas

It’s mid-July almost month after Midsummer as I’m writing this blog post. Much has happened since I started my work in our department in May. While different work assignments have kept me busy, I’ve got to learn new things almost every day. Some days have been busier than others and some more educational.

At the moment most of my team members are on their holidays and it has been a bit quieter here in our office. While my other team members, who already have spent their holidays, have been busy with their own work assignments, I’ve been working on with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), a programming language used in Excel and some other Office programs, to automate different tasks in Excel by writing macros. These macros are meant for emission calculation tool used to analyse data collected from emission measurements. Although I don’t have any previous background of writing macros with VBA, my knowledge of programming with Python has helped me quite a lot to get started.

While it can be quite tedious, boring and time-consuming to copy and paste values and formulas in Excel to get everything done, macros are a great way to make our work more efficient by automating these time-consuming tasks. Programming might feel a bit difficult to get started with at first, but when you start to understand how the language works and realize what you can do with it, it will pay off and you’ll start get more fluent at utilising it. And when you’re working with a huge amount of data, it can be almost impossible to manage without some form of automation.

Hello everyone! Midsummer festivities have been celebrated and we’re back at the office. Or at least summer trainees since it seems in Turku that most people have left for their summer holidays. There is suddenly lots of room in the cafeteria during lunch time and it’s easy to find parking place in the parking lot. One can say that summer has officially started.

And so started my back up duties as well. I have to support one colleague for some weeks, take care of my own cases and every once in a while help the other co-workers as well. In other words pressure is growing all the time and the same amount of work need to be done anyway. But that’s why I’m here during the summer so that people can enjoy their holiday for which they have worked for the whole long dark winter time. At least in midsummer it wasn’t snowing at all this year!

One can wonder what I basically do then during my working day. I start my morning going through my emails and opening the SAP where we handle all the spare part related claims that have been raised by our Network companies on behalf of customers. Then it’s basically solving different issues related to everything between wrong parts delivered to invoicing. Some problems are bigger and more urgent than the others but all the claims need to be handled with care. Someone once said that the best marketing is superior customer service when something goes wrong. In the global supply chain everything can happen and with millions (figuratively) of different spare parts some mix-ups might happen every once in a while.

Hello everyone! My name is Emilia Hyvätti and this summer, I’ll be working as a Training Coordinator trainee in Wärtsilä Land & Sea Academy in Turku. I am a 26-year-old international business student from Turku School of Economics. I just finalized my bachelor’s thesis and I’ll be starting my master’s studies with a student exchange period to Seoul, South Korea next autumn semester.

This is my very first experience of working for Wärtsilä. My previous working history comes from several years in banking and insurance business, so jumping into the train at Wärtsilä’s stop is quite a big leap into the unknown for me. Though, this leap was totally intentional as I wanted to challenge myself more professionally this summer. I wanted into an international working environment and this is exactly what Wärtsilä is able to offer me. Not a day goes by that I wouldn’t use English. Here in WLSA we have a lot of course participants from Africa so my French is getting better as well!

I’ve been a trainee for a month now, and the days are just flying by. Every day there’s something new to learn and new cases to solve. Situations in our training centre, which is the busiest one in the world, can change rapidly and we have to adapt to these situations swiftly. Here, there are four coordinators, including me, so luckily we can put our wise heads together when dealing with challenges. Team work is essential in this job and I’m grateful for my lovely colleagues I have the chance to work with and to learn from.

I was quite nervous for coming to Wärtsilä as technical field of business is a little bit unfamiliar for me. But hey, isn’t the whole point of when starting your career to challenge yourself in order to find out what you truly want to do when you grow up? This is what I came to Wärtsilä for, to challenge myself, and currently I’m enjoying every minute of it.

I’ll tell you more about my job in the future posts during this summer, so let’s keep in touch!

Summery regards,

-Emilia

As the summer training period from May to August is coming to an end, it is time to look back and review what has been done and learnt. I have continued with activities from my previous work at the engine laboratory – which was mainly assisting engine tests and reporting about them. There were also new duties that provided greater insight about the work here and how it happens in practice. Knowing what is needed and how to do it has allowed me to work more independently than before.

Days have been very different, including work in the office with the team or independently, running the engine in test run and meetings with colleagues from other departments, who work on diverse aspects of the same project.

Getting to know the engine, how it behaves in different modes of operation and how changes in a particular parameter can affect other parameters is a long-term study. This summer, I learnt more about this vast subject and will be glad to continue doing so in the future.

Soon, as University studies proceed, it will be interesting to combine theoretical and practical sides of the same subject. For this reason, I believe it is a great opportunity to have one or several training periods during the studies that are related to your field and I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Have a nice rest of the summer! :)

- Evgenia

Hi everyone, My name is Kari. I was a trainee at Wärtsilä in 1989, so it is already some time ago. Or maybe you can say it is still ongoing….

At the end of my traineeship I was asked whether I would like to stay with Wärtsilä, and after finishing my few pending exams I returned a little bit later and started as a legal counsel. There has been no boring day since. First I spent a couple of years mostly with divesting a number of businesses of the conglomerate Wärtsilä was. Then I moved to one of the divisions which was at that time called Wärtsilä Diesel. I worked mostly with negotiating contracts for large sales projects and creating a fundament for a successful contracting practice, before I became the General Counsel of the division.

I then worked about seven years in France and Switzerland before returning to Helsinki. For Wärtsilä it was a time of strong growth, and I worked on many mergers & acquisitions. As a member of the Board of Management of Wärtsilä Corporation, I am now responsible for Corporate Relations and Legal, covering also IPR, Sustainability and EHSS (Environment, Health & Safety and Security).