Founder and managing shareholder of the Rodermund Konstruktion und Entwicklung GmbH

What am I doing here?

My drive is the desire to find good solutions to make things work well. I attach great importance to choosing my tools in such a way that I can work efficiently. I also like to determine my work content and times myself.

The way to my own company

What is most important to me in my work is the result. In the course of my professional life, the desire to become independent of hierarchies, process theater and internal company politics matured. In 2018, I took advantage of favorable conditions to start my own company Rodermund Konstruktion und Entwicklung GmbH, R-Kon for short, and offer my services independently.

It never got boring: Especially at the beginning I had to learn and use many new skills since then. This includes in particular commercial work from liquidity planning and offer calculation to financial accounting and payroll accounting and some web development technologies such as HTML, PHP and CSS as well as programming knowledge in JavaScript. Of course, I also get to know new machines, environments and procedures in many projects. It's exhausting at times, but I find it refreshing.

Despite all the tasks that come with having your own company and despite the difficult conditions for entrepreneurs in Germany, I spend a gratifyingly large proportion of my working time on technical work, i.e. making sure that things work better. With many customers, the cooperation works on the "short official channels" and the internal organization runs as little bureaucracy as possible.

The flexibility that I have with R-Kon also enables me to study computer science part-time, the content of which is useful for corporate IT and automation in CAD using VB.NET and the Inventor-API.

And the result?

As I had hoped, the result is what counts in my working life at R-Kon: customers are satisfied with my designs, trainings and CAD scripts and I notice this in the feedback or repeat orders. It's sometimes exhausting, but thanks to serious capacity planning and direct communication, I can usually keep promised schedules without any problems.

My background

My interest in mechanical engineering has been with me since I was young: as early as the upper level of the technical high school where I graduated from high school, I had chosen "Metal Technology" as an advanced course, which corresponded to the basics in mechanical engineering studies.

After graduating as Dipl.-Ing. (FH) mechanical engineering with a focus on "design" in 2006, I initially worked for 11 years as a development designer and technical sub-project manager in the mechanical design of ring rolling machines at SMS Eumuco (later "SMS Meer", later "SMS group"). At the then world market leader for forging and rolling mill technology, I gained extensive experience in worldwide special machine design and ultimately played a key role in developing the mechanics of a new generation of ring rolling machines, which included testing the prototypes and helping to patent new devices. The day-to-day business included the design and calculation of purchased and manufactured parts (shafts, bearings, welded parts, cylinders, clamping devices, guides, gears, couplings, cooling, heating, ...) as well as the design of components optimized for manufacture and assembly.

My desire to make my own workflows as efficient as possible gave rise to my keen interest in advanced CAD methods, in particular automation using script programming in the CAD system and the construction of centrally controlled top-down models for highly automated scaling and modularization of entire systems Machines with around 400 drawing parts. I also used the insights I gained from this intensive study of the influence of different working methods on model stability to develop CAD guidelines and training material to improve model quality.

Also in technical calculations, a focus of interest was on increasing efficiency through universally reusable and transparent calculations in Mathcad and later SMath Studio. In order to achieve the greatest possible understanding of production technology and mechanical stress, I took part in further training in damage analysis on mechanical components and designing in welding technology. During the design process, I regularly carry out FEA simulations that accompany the design.