Interview with Arno Cleven

Hi Arno, can you introduce yourself?

Hi everybody! My name is Arno and I am the Head of Engineering at PTN. I was born and raised in Melderslo, a village with about 2,000 inhabitants in the province of Limburg. I currently live here with my wife Laura and our 11-month-old son.

Before I ended up at PTN, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering in Eindhoven. After that, I started working at PTN through an agency to further develop the MonoRoll. This was a logical choice for me, because I have always been interested in technology. At home I was not the only one interested in technology: my brother works at Dinnissen, with whom we, as the Triott Group, now work more closely.

How do you feel about working at PTN?

I really enjoy my time at PTN. On my way from home to the PTN office, I spot plenty of companies where I could work just fine, but at PTN I find everything I’m looking for in a job. There are short lines of communication, which makes it very easy for me to check information with other colleagues. Also, I know everyone by name, which is very nice.

In addition, my position has mutual aspects with production, despite the fact that I work 100% in the office. The fact that production at PTN is located directly at our office makes it very easy for me to collect feedback from colleagues who make or maintain our machines. As a result, practice is never far away and it is easy to measure whether our ideas also work there.

What are your main tasks as head of engineering?

My main tasks are to plan engineering, to monitor our machine quality and looking at where we can make improvements. I actually do this mainly on the basis of data, customer feedback and feedback from our (service) technicians. This gives us a fairly good idea of what can be improved and where we can make improvements in optimizing machines or parts. For this I also visit clients a few times a year.

We first test the improvements that we make to machines in simulations. If these are good, we test them in real life at the customer. These customers then provide us with feedback, which we can then implement again. In this way, our machines are always evolving and we never stand still. In addition to these improvements to machines, we are also working on improving drawings and simplifying production.

What do you like most about your job?

I like the variety of work that I do. I am busy leading the department, visiting customers or the workshop and I also work on improving our machines myself. This means that no day is the same and I have a perfect balance between theory and practice.

In addition, I really appreciate PTN for the opportunities that I have been given and continue to receive. In this way I have gained the confidence to become head of engineering and there is still room to grow within the organization.

I also really like that we have our own production capacity and that we do the entire development from A to Z in-house. We can make use of the Triott Development Center for this, which makes it possible to discuss with engineers who do not work directly within PTN.

What makes PTN’s services/machines so unique and why should a customer choose PTN?

In my opinion, PTN is always prepared to think outside the box and to offer a customer real customizations. If a customer comes with a special request, we will not say ‘no’ quickly and always check whether it is technically and financially possible. We do not limit ourselves to ‘standard thinking’, but we like to think along with the customer.

For example, we once installed a machine whose engine was hanging under the floor due to lack of space. We also once adapted crumblers to crumble salt. These kinds of projects characterize us.