Pekka Lehtinen

Who is Pekka Lehtinen?

I am 60 years old and have lived in Turku Finland my whole life. I am technically minded, logical and curious with a B.Sc. in Engineering and an M.Sc. in Economics. I have three adult daughters, one grand­son, two-and-a-half-year-old Kas­pian, and two more grandchildren on the way later this year.

Once a week I play badminton and floor ball and I try to do some yoga at least once a week to stay flexible. I am also currently study­ing a little German and Russian. My house requires constant attention and when I have free time, I read as much as I can.

How and when did you end up at Cadmatic?

I started working first for Cadmatic’s mother company Elomatic in 2007. At the time, I had my own one-man company working in the IT sector with IBM computers. IBM comput­ers were disappearing gradually, and I had to think about doing something else. I also wanted a change after having done IT work with administrative applications for 20 years. At Elomatic, I worked as a deck outfitting, HVAC, and machin­ery designer.

At the end of 2014, I noticed an open position for an application specialist at Cadmatic. I decided to apply and was lucky enough to get the job.

What is your current position and what are your most import­ant tasks?

I am an Application Specialist. I have two main tasks, maintaining our Delivery Example Project and working at our help desk where I help our customers to find solu­tions to any challenges they may have. The Delivery Example Project is the project that is delivered to our customers with the installation media. It contains a lot of different components and acts as an ex­ample to the customer as to how different things should be created and used in a project.

My work is divided about 50/50 between those two tasks and I consider them to be equally im­portant. If I could choose just one, I would say the help desk is the most important.

What are the most challenging aspects of your work?

We have many rather large applica­tions and we do not often get the same questions from customers. It is challenging to remember how all the applications work. You may remember that you did something similar a couple of years ago, but what was it exactly?

Another challenge is giving customers short and clear answers that cannot be misunderstood. Pri­oritizing is another; I usually have many tasks waiting and I have to decide the order in which tasks should be tackled.

What do you like most about your work?

The possibility to learn more all the time. I could not do the same job from day to day without the pos­sibility to learn more. In this posi­tion, I learn new things all the time. It is impossible to know everything about our fast-developing appli­cations. It is also interesting to see how the software evolves and be­comes more comprehensive and better all the time.

What have been the biggest changes in your work over re­cent years?

I have only been in this position for five years, so not that much has changed. One change has been the introduction of communica­tion tools like Microsoft Teams. Before we used to communicate mostly by email, nowadays mostly with Teams. Another change has been the merging of the customer service organization in the Neth­erlands and Finland. We are now under the same umbrella and we have regular global meetings via Teams.

You recently did an exchange to India. How did it come about and what was the experience like?

In April 2019, some colleagues from India trained with us in Fin­land. I thought it would be a good idea to visit them in India, which they advised would be better after the rainy season. I visited our of­fice in Mumbai for four weeks in November.

It was nice to get to know the Indian culture. The food, traffic, climate, and religion are all very different from Finland. The way of working, however, is quite similar. My Indian colleagues are hard­working, smart, polite, and friendly people. I find it hard sometimes to understand the Indian accent, so I hoped that my understanding would improve during the visit. My colleagues were very patient with me and in the end, I understood them quite well.

How does cooperation with the international offices work?

Although Cadmatic is very in­ternational, our activities are still mostly local: Think global, act local. It is still easier to communicate with colleagues that are in the same office. If there are problems that cannot be solved locally, we ask our colleagues in other offices for advice. We also have regular global Microsoft Teams meetings to stay on top of what is happening in our customer service around the world.