Digitisation at MAPAL
As Team Leader of IT Client Management, Sebastian Schaal is pulling the strings in the background
All roads lead to Aalen. From here, IT Client Management orchestrates the technical infrastructure of the MAPAL sites. Sebastian Schaal works to ensure that all employees worldwide benefit from the same user experience.
“We actually take care of everything that runs in the background: Guidelines, controlling updates, central settings. So that IT can concentrate fully on service.” The trained IT specialist for system administration knows what he’s talking about; after all, he’s already been able to gain some service experience in his professional career. He joined the company in 2018, when MAPAL was just starting to move to Office 365 and was increasingly investing in cloud services. “It was an exciting time back then”, Sebastian Schaal recalls. It also awakened in him the desire to shift his focus more to the back end. This way, he can dive deep into systems and implement ideas (without being distracted by the daily service business). In 2020, he was promoted to team leader of the newly created IT Client Management department.
The desire to start all over again
In order to be successful in IT teams, Sebastian Schaal is convinced you have to have an independent way of working and also have the desire to start again from scratch. After all, you search for solutions in your field via many paths and a lot of the time you come to a dead end. You have to be able to cope with that, Sebastian says calmly. “If you’re really interested in finding good solutions, it’s all the more fun when you’ve found something that goes down well. There’s a lot of feedback and you can feel the gratitude of the colleagues at the sites. Then you know why you've spent weeks thinking about it.”Networked with the world
What he appreciates about his work is the many connections with other departments and especially the international contact: “Sometimes you’re on the phone with Japan, India, Romania and the USA in a single working day. Being in contact with so many countries and cultures is very enriching for me, because it tends not to be like this in your private life.” Sebastian has already experienced for himself that the cooperation with a site can also temporarily change into an on-site commitment. In 2018, he was given the opportunity to support a major server changeover in client services at the Tokyo site for a fortnight. An experience that shaped him and for which he is still very grateful today.
In a manufacturing industry, interlocking system landscapes are simply crucial to success. “IT is becoming more and more important these days. Without IT, there is no digitalisation – and no development”, Sebastian sums up. And a little pride can be heard in his voice when he adds: “That’s why we contribute significantly to the future viability of the company.”
