Thirty-seven-year-old Stefan Swanepoel is an associate consultant at Pragma. He obtained his B. Eng. and M. Eng. Electronic Engineering degrees from the University of Pretoria.
Stefan has been with Pragma for almost three years. Prior to joining Pragma, he worked at Gaussian for two and a half years doing asset management, energy optimisation engineering and housing development project management work. He also worked at Flextronics for two years as engineering manager in the VoIP product development team and at Stratex Networks for four and a half years as project manager and development engineer for the digital terminal development team in the broadband wireless team. He also worked at the Research Enterprise at the University of Pretoria for just over a year as project engineer working on spectrally efficient radio systems. Stefan started his career at Azisa, a telecoms software engineering company.
He lives in Stellenbosch with his wife and two boys aged 7 and 9. Says Stefan: “I’m not a ‘most favourite’ or ‘greatest ever’ type person. I’ve had good achievements at school, academically and in my working life, but can’t single one out. I hope one day to look back at an interesting engineering career while raising two successful, happy boys and being happily married through all of it as a ‘greatest’ achievement.” He says that he sometimes finds it difficult to stay focused on completing things which do not interest him but need to get done. “In my free time, I enjoy spending time with our boys, doing DIY projects, and working with hardware as well as software.”
With regards to physical asset management, Stefan says: “Make sure you have a clear, well communicated and well understood three to five year strategy for asset management at your organisation with direct links to your overall business objectives. Focus on no more than five high level initiatives per year. At a minimum, make sure all your assets are accounted for in your asset register. Ensure that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities in the planning and execution of maintenance work and that all maintenance work, tactical (preventative/predictive) and non-tactical (reactive), are managed through your maintenance management system. Once these basics are in place you should focus on a structured problem solving method integrated with your work management system, while improving the asset care plans used to keep equipment reliable.”
