Vanwege het internationale karakter van ons bedrijf en onze medewerkers hebben we hun verhalen en ervaringen in het Engels weergegeven.

"Dedicating my heart and soul to our patients, but also to our employees."

Finy lives in Bocholtz together with her 14-year-old daughter. In her spare time, she simply enjoys the small things in life. For example, sitting on a terrace and enjoying the sun.

In the past 24 years with Medtronic, Finy has always been loyal to her colleagues and the people who work in her team. Finy has been spending her entire working career at our Cardiac Surgery Operations facility in Kerkrade, where we manufacture custom packs for perfusion systems of heart-lung machines.

Finy about her position at Medtronic

In my current role, I am a production supervisor. Together with my team, I am responsible for running the production of perfusion systems and as a team, we meet the daily production goals for our Kerkrade facility.

My day starts with a cup of coffee and our morning team meeting. We discuss the number of orders that are coming in, the number of orders that need to go out, what we currently have in our production line etc. This meeting is a cross-functional meeting with people from our logistics center, our cleanroom, planning department and our technical team.

Together with my team, I am responsible for the cleanroom and packing activities and the production inspection. Every day, I have an operations meeting with the group leaders who report to me. There are a lot of ad hoc and operational activities that I work on every day. In total, we have a team of 150 employees, who work in two shifts.

Finy’s education and career path

My background might be a bit unusual. In my early career, I was a dressmaker. I wanted a career change and that’s how I started work as an Operator A. Over the years, I grew into an Operator C position and after that, I became a group leader. Since two years, I am the supervisor monitoring six group leaders.

Most challenging in my current role

The biggest challenges in my role are simple and fairly obvious: ensuring a good communication and a strong collaboration between and within the teams. In my role,
I need to ensure that everyone is motivated, strives for the same goal and is on the same page. Helping and thinking along with people to solve a problem or answer questions, is very important to me. This means that I am not only dedicating my heart and soul to our patients, but also to our employees.

What I like most in my current job

I love to work with people! I am an empathic person who is involved and very passionate in working with others. I find listening to people and taking the time for them, very important. At the same time, I enjoy having a busy day; when all those planned orders arrive at the customers in time, even when deadlines are tight, urgent requests intervene and a lot of things need to be arranged and organized, that is the moment when I am at my best. If you can achieve that with a team, that makes me proud.

What I like about working for Medtronic

What I enjoy most is that I contribute to the work that we do as a company. Besides that,
I like the fact that not one single day is the same.

What ‘Further, Together’ means to me

Further, Together for me means working together, achieving together. There is this saying, “Alone you go fast, together you go far”. And that is what I strongly believe in. For me, this also means to keep on focusing as a team how we can improve, and what we can do differently. And lastly: it means pride. Pride in my work. With a group of 150 people, we ensure that the perfusion custom packs reach our patients in time.

My most memorable experiences at Medtronic

Before I started working at Medtronic, I supported my husband who needed a bone marrow transplant. He stayed in hospital for 6 weeks. In those 6 weeks, I constantly had to wear a face mask while visiting him. Because of the memories, that face mask almost traumatized me. A few years later, while working at Medtronic, I had the opportunity to attend an open-heart operation.

At first, I was a bit nervous. Being present in that operating room, means wearing a face mask again. To be honest, I got a bit emotional. It reminded me of the time spent with my late husband in the hospital. However, never have I seen something so amazing! I was fascinated from the beginning until the end – from the first incision until the moment when the surgeon closed the chest of the patient, stitching everything so meticulously. Having worked as a dressmaker for 12 years, it made me realize even more how extraordinary this was, and I felt so lucky that, by working for Medtronic, I can contribute to this.