What is your task at Ilmatar, what kind of different things and tasks do your working days include?
I am the procurement manager for solar and BESS, responsible for procuring the key components of our assets: Solar modules, inverters, battery systems and our quality assurance processes for each of those components. Together with the ESG and Engineering teams we have screened the supplier market and shortlisted suppliers of each category. Now I am negotiating framework agreements with our selected suppliers for modules and inverters; for BESS we are still working on project-specific contracts.
Being the first point of contact to the main suppliers means that typical tasks include: regularly meeting the key suppliers, continuous screening of the market for new suppliers and technologies, preparing and negotiating supply contracts, auditing supplier’s factories and contracting the quality assurance plan for each of those main components. And internally I work together with many different teams, of which the most regular with ESG, Engineering and Legal teams.
How do you like it at Ilmatar? What do you enjoy most about being part of the Ilmatar team?
It has been good, much better than I even could imagine. I really like that the colleagues are very talented and ambitious people. It is easy to communicate with pretty much everybody. While there may not be extensive experience in the solar industry yet, the individuals involved truly possess the right attitude and mindset. The company itself is very ambitious as well and has good targets. So far, it has been above my expectations. I am very happy that I joined.
Tell briefly about your career before Ilmatar
I have been working for one year in the solar industry in the Netherlands and that was at a small B2C & B2B company, where we were doing rooftop solar projects. I was in procurement there, and as it was a very small company, I was also the solar technology expert. Then I moved to Finland in 2016 and I joined Fortum quite soon after that. I was there in the solar technology team for five years and for one year I did procurement for solar and Battery Energy Storage System (BESS). That is basically the same role that I have now in Ilmatar. We were developing about one gigawatt (GW) of solar during the time that I was there, so I have been contributing from different points of views to that one GW. During the time in the technology team, I was also heading the technical due diligence processes for M&A cases.
What kind of an educational background do you have?
Maybe not a surprise that that is also in solar. I have a Master of Science degree in sustainable energy technologies from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. In the master’s I specialized in solar energy. During the university, I also worked at the university as a student assistant. I developed solar energy courses and the course material for the future years together with the professor. We developed among others an online course about solar energy where 10s of thousands of people have participated from all over the world. It’s still online, so if people are wanting to learn more about solar energy, that’s a good place to start. It’s a free and open online course in a platform called at EDX. Here is the link: https://www.edx.org/professional-certificate/delftx-solar-energy
What are the best lessons you have learned during your career?
There are many, but maybe the most important one that I’ve noticed is a bit cliche, but that communication is key. We are now in living in times where a lot of the communication is digital, so a lot of emails for example. Miscommunications are very easily made. In emails you miss all context, you don’t see the body language, you don’t hear how people are putting emphasis somewhere, so you miss a lot of parts of the communication and that’s why on e-mail I usually over communicate to make things quite clear and that to make sure that there’s no misunderstandings.
