I asked for the opportunity to combine my two passions - travelling and construction.
Just as Acam believed I could do the job from anywhere, I believed Acam would look for ways to manage this regime.
Hey. Hey.
I'm Pepa Březina.
I graduated with a Master's degree at the Institute of Design, where I was mainly involved in additive technologies and was in charge of the student laboratory. But today I am in a quite different world, where I combine designing automation lines in a small company Acam and travelling around the world.
How did I get into this? Well, this is the company I started working for after school as a temp. Just to have time to do what I enjoy. Covid came in, I was trusted to finish big projects and I became important to the company. Now I'm in a senior position handling projects. Nothing really interesting yet. I mean, there is, but nothing you need to read this for.
Why you're reading this is because I still have that freedom. I can work from anywhere. Have a laptop on the beach, coconut in hand, and take a call? Yeah, right. Be mountain sick 4 kilometers above sea level and draw a line? Yeah. I really can be anywhere, but of course it's not free. I don't mean money, I mean duty. Sometimes I just don't have enough and I have to go back to Brno for a project, or even for the dentist. Now it works out to about 3 months on the company, 3 months off.
So what kind of work do I do? Well, the simple script is pretty straightforward. I get a quote from a customer. From that, I design a concept, we go over it with the CTO to see if it makes sense, and I throw out some short document with a price tag
I usually present it as well. After the tender is won, we get the green light and a big round of meetings and design approvals begin. This is where the phase starts where the roles get a little bit split depending on the complexity of the project. This means that I don't have to do everything, but if I'm the project manager, I still have to keep track of everything. The documentation is created and sent to purchasing. For the engineer, maybe final, but not for me. Next comes communication with the assembly, electricians, programmers and of course the customer. Gradually various acceptance tests, pre-acceptance tests take place until the stage where the whole live machine is standing and ready to be shipped. It is during the revival of the machine that I prefer to be in Brno and meet my friends. Then I just have to move the machine to the customer, get it working there and I can go another round with another project. It's hardly ever like this from start to finish, it's not the only things I'm dealing with in the meantime and sometimes I'm also free. But that's basically the skeleton.
And can this circus be managed from abroad? Yeah, it can. It just takes some strong internet, some peace of mind to work, and most importantly a cool location at your back. So far, I've managed to design a line in Indonesia, win a tender in Thailand, break a customer's product in Chile, or make a call with Americans from India.
And it's not all small names, although it's usually more fun for those small customers. But it's companies like Resideo, Saint Gobain, Edwards, and Zebra, just for a little ego boost. Well, the countries I've been to? I'm currently in Japan near Mitsumoto. But I've also managed to visit parts of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Turkey, Iceland, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, the USA, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Norway, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and now South Korea, China and Egypt.
It all sounds great. It is. It's just a lot more challenging. Mostly it's a lot of headache. But in general, I'm perpetually dissatisfied, so now should be the time to be grateful. Which I am.
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