ABB is a good company to work for - not a great one!
ABB is a large engineering and technical services company with world headquarters based in Zurich, Switzerland. ABB operates in most countries on Earth and employees about 150,000 employees. Even though ABB has significant operations in North America, there is a heavy European flavour to their corporate culture, so please be aware of this. When I worked in Canada, there was a marked downside to the Canadian leadership and it was because of this, I resigned. Most of that leadership ladder has since been fired or has resigned (mostly fired), so things have improved so I am told.
ABB had a matrix management structure which is typical of European companies, which means, in simple terms, that you can have two or more bosses, who can have conflicting agendas putting you in the middle to try to figure out who you want to please the most (you can never win with this deal, believe me). In my case, I had 14 Division Managers to report to across the top of the grid and a national executive on the vertical. Writing a strategic plan and trying to get buy-in from all stakeholders will try your patience to the max because most of these Divisional people will be a complete stranger to you when you start and will be an almost-complete stranger to you when you leave because you probably will never meet them in person (other than through electronic media). It can be a very lonely professional existence.
Because of poor decisions in the 1980's and 90's, ABB almost became insolvent. As such
Typically my day starts at 7:30am. Daily meeting with my Lead Designer about ongoing projects progress. Drawing updates, special reviews, design meetings etc. Take special assignment if any or continue with ongoing project drawings. Drawings were related to Electrical Engg. for Oil & Gas SAGD projects.
I was totally new to this kind of concept compared to my previous experience. But the team or co-workers were awesome in all aspects. I was able access any support regarding design, drafting and engineering. Most of the co-workers were very senior but very down to earth kind of nature and with helping mentality.
Initially it was very hard for me to co-ordinate the system working. I only knew about the project was Control system drawings, as I had some previous hands-on experience in that field. But managed to understand the project and co-ordinate it within two months.
Most enjoyable part of job was at the lunch time where we used to get together at kitchen and take our lunch and followed by an afternoon walk for 15 minutes outside the office.
Management was awesome, easy to approach, mentoring and helpful.
Innovative work place and life long lerning experience. Company organized parties are fun filled.
I have worked hydro, thermal and solar power plant projects with substations.
The power projects of complex nature demands innovative solution. Engineering of the systems, design, layout, procurement, time schedule require team work with regular interface, coordination and attending many types of issues on daily basis.
It is important and a must to assimilate the specifications, contractual scope, owner and consultant expectations in the design, procurement and execution. Not to forget the contract changes for additional cost and time for additional work.
Job stress and multi tasking cooperation results in a project which becomes a mile stone and brings smile to all parties working for the project.
Job in ABB is challenging as well as interesting and helpful for personal growth of technical knowledge.
ProsIn-house and external training, and regular reviews of projects, and lessons learn meetings on project completion are eye opener for team members.
ConsHigher expectations, loss of focus on project management
J'ai travailler au campus de St-Laurent comme assembleur pendant un mois. Pour moi qui est diplômé en électromécanique et qui à des années d'expérience en assemblage électrique c'était un succès et une fierté de travailler là bas. Mais après 1 mois la compagnie m'a littéralement renvoyer en disant que je ne répondais pas aux exigences de l'emploi. Pourtant pendant un mois je me réveillais a 3h00 am de l'est de Montréal pour prendre 3 autobus voire même que j'étais toujours à l'heure (juste pour vous montrez à quel point j'étais motivé). J'étais très discipliné et je n'avais même jamais eu de premier avis. Même que mon dernier jour là bas ils ont pris mon manteau,sans me le demander, et l'on envoyer a l'entrée. Puis ensuite ils m'ont expédié chez moi en taxi, heureusement c'est eux qu'ils ont payer pour. J'ai même reçu 924$ d'indemnité ce qui est très gros pour quelqun qui a juste fait un mois....bref des fois j'y pense encore ça m'a vraiment fait mal...
1.Journée de travail:
-6h00: Départ du camp pour le chantier
-Réunion sécurité et repartition tâches à 6h30.(Électricité, civil et mécanique)
-7h00 début travaux.
-Tours sur chantier pour contrôle qualité et suivi travaux.
-Réunion suivi avec le client
-12h00-12h30: Repas
-Suivi qualité et travaux.
-Rédaction rapports divers: courbe d'avancement (progress report), rapports sécurité, rapports qualité,
17h30: fin journée et depart pour le camp
18h00: arrivée au camp
2. J'ai appris le fonctionnement d'un poste SVAC et comment le construire
3. Management axé uniquement sur l'aspect technique pas sur la satisfaction du personnel
4. Collaborateurs corrects
5. Aspect le plus difficile: Client très exigeant (HydroQuébec)
6. Aspect le plus agréable: Nourriture au camp
.
ProsRepas et logement gratuits
ConsHoraires harassants
4.0
Administrative Assistant | Calgary, AB | Sep 20, 2016
Abb inc.
Ensuring that the office is stocked and prepared for a productive day. Scheduling meetings, booking boardrooms and making any travel arrangements for management. Reconciling expense reports. Ordering lunches for meetings and lunch & learns. Coordinating all social club events
Within my role I have learned that when you do your job well and do it with a positive attitude your managers and coworkers appreciate your dedication.
The most difficult part of my job was honestly being in an industry that is suffering right now and watching so many fantastic people being let go.
The most enjoyable part of my job was coordinating all corporate events (Stampede breakfasts and rodeo, customer golf tournaments etc.) and ensuring that our customers were having a good time and were happy.
I gained a good understanding of the workings of hydro plants, solar plants, combined cycle plants and microgrids.
I developed skills such as ownership of problems and produce effective and timely solutions and enhanced my oral and written communications skills with the ability to write technical reports and make presentations with ease.
Learned how to deal effectively with clients, vendors and contractors and have had site experience pertaining to QA and commissioning.
Very friendly environment and people are very helpful indeed.
The hardest part of the job is driving from home to my workplace and the most enjoyable part is when I have a challenge and able to solve it as per management expectations.
well disciplined and structured manufacturing facility
typical day was to meet with employees and detail the work objectives for the day as well as dciscuss lessons learned from previous days activities. I learned that every employee contributes in their function at different levels and matching the individual contribution abilities with the needed task was a challenge. I was always suported by upper managment but the goal was to make everyone accountable for their part of the given tasks.Some co workers were independant and others needed coaching to finish the tasks at hand.the hardest part was to sometimes remove empoloyees that were not stepping up to task requirments.I truely enjoyed when we finished ahead of schedule and under budget.
Prostraining was well documented and followed up.
1.0
Business Development Manager | Calgary, AB | Aug 12, 2015
Do not work for this company !
Be very careful with this company, in particular which business unit
you apply to.
In general, I was incredibly surprised at the complete lack of integrity displayed by management and the company in general. They covered just about every type of management transgression I can think of (lying, bullying, berating, manipulation). At some point you have to think that this behaviour is driven from the top down.
Having said the above, there are some good people that work here so obviously everyones experience is not the same. But again, I am a 20 + year professional who has worked for several big corporations and I have never seen or witnessed the type of behaviour displayed by the management of this company.
Excellent professional working environment, . A lot of smart people who became my mentors, I learned a lot from them.
Excellent place to work in if you are a rookie designer, I like the fact that nobody in the office will belittle or humiliate you if you ask questions to technical stuff that you don't know about yet, even stupid questions because asking questions are actually encouraged, there is a saying in the office that "there are no stupid questions". This working environment really helped me learn, grow and acquire knowledge fast.
Everyone is a professional and anyone who violates the code of ethics are immediately weeded out.
Prosfree fruit basket every week. relatively flexible working hours.
Installing and configuring VIO Servers, building LPAR clients and sharing IO devices to LPARs.
Installation & configuring of PowerHA 6.1
Migrated Power HA from 5.x to 6.1 using different methods to reduce the downtime to the application
Performing fail-over , fall back between the HA cluster nodes
Troubleshooting the POWER HA and increasing the filesystem in HACMP/POWER HA cluster
Hardware replacement of cluster nodes without any downtime
Planning the major patch releases by coordinating with the application team for the proper implementation of security patches within the environments
Involved in hardware migration of servers from p5 to p6 & p7
Developed and implemented the shell scripting for taking mksysb and push to the centralized NIM server.
Migration of OS through NIM master
Involved in migration of Physical to virtual servers (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V)
VIO Server operations, creating virtual adapters and configuring Ethernet or LUNs to LPARs and performing other troubleshooting techniques. Creating ether channel with link aggregation etc.
Installing and Configuring MPIO in dual VIO environment for providing continuous availability of storage to the LPAR's.
Configuring SEA failover in dual VIO environment for providing continuous availability communication to the LPAR's.
Applying security patches to VIO servers without impacting to VIO client
Planning of downtime for the hardware upgrades for the man
very good working place with stimulating enviornment
It was amazing experience being a part of ABB student intern program ! I completely enjoyed the learning at India Corporate Research Center. Here I experienced, how scientists are putting their extra ordinary efforts to establish next generation technology which is not only most effective but also most advanced in terms of reduction in environmental impact.
I must admit that at ABB, the work culture is too good & people are very much helpful to solve any problem which an intern might face. Even during the project, conversation with other corporate research center (Switzerland,Germany) and valuable guidance of scientist working there has motivated me a lot for Research & Development. Within ABB GISL also, i interacted with different department people and got very good and helpful response. I attended 2 ABB talk at INCRC in which researchers used to give overall idea of their research and there will be a discussion on some topic. I would say it was one of the best experience at ABB. I liked library resources as well, i used to go with what are current trends in technology and how ABB is contributing in various areas. Along with ABB reviews, library is full worthy for subject books and technology magazines.
As an research intern, one can get all the resources needed to experiment, explore, enhance the cutting edge technology. The research team really creates best learning environment to contribute for state of the art technology, as well as motivates students in the res
As a very large diversified corporation, ABB affords numerous opportunities for career development, both cross functionally as well as vertically in o
The duties of my most recent role as Strategic Business Development Manager varied in nature and focus throughout the course of each month. While researching and developing ways to ever increase sales of our electrical utility products for the renewable energy generation market was a prime responsibility, I also devoted considerable production to analyzing and presenting numerous marketing and engineering performance indicators to all functional departments within the Division. I also routinely made presentations, supplied reports, trained and evaluated personnel, and attended trade conferences.
Inasmuch as my in-house, as well as external, customers varied extensively in terms of personnel, requirements, and preferences, I'd learned to become very flexible in my work manner and perspectives to optimally accommodate individuals’ needs.
While it was the responsibility of my managers to call directions and thereby 'lead the way' toward particular goals, I quickly discovered that their effectiveness significantly improved as I became more adept at proactively interpreting their unspoken requests and consequently deliver more strategic results.
Many of my co-workers were new to their assignments, a situation often repeating throughout each year. Having served a number of varied roles in the past, I was generally able to supplement their training and develop tools and procedures to help them more quickly assimilate their responsibilities.
Much my work output depende
ProsDeveloping a tool, report, or presentation, that succeeded in helping a customer, generate business, or helping an associate better perform their job. Fair benefits and compensation administration.
ConsWhile it's certainly beneficial to accurately anticipate major corporate actions, particularly those in which local individuals may be significantly affected, managerial decisions have sometimes occurred, leaving insufficient time for prudent individual reaction.
Empresa com expressiva posição na área em que atua, com áreas atrasadas em termos de processo e estilos de liderança.
Empresa de grande porte, com expressiva posição no mercado em que atua, segmento eletroeletrônico.
Muitos erros na implementação por exemplo do Sistema SAP, devido à falha em planejamento da empresa impactaram significativamente nossa área,a partir de Julho de 2012 devido a migrações erroneas de projetos do sistema ERP anterior, impactando numeros e dados estatisticos em projetos, demandando, um esforço adicional, principalmente com projetos mais antigos.Demandou esforço também para ajustar o sistema para emissao de NFs e demais lançamentos de dados dos contratos/projetos. Treinamento ineficiente, somado a processos mal desenhados nessa implantação.
A planta em Sorocaba/SP contava então com várias unidades de negócio e onde eu atuava não contava com uma estrutura solida em termos de processos, estava em reestruturação e adaptação. Durante o periodo em que estive la, a experiencia no primeiro ano de trabalho, inicialmente alocados em Osasco/SP considero muito boa em termos de ambiente, porém, devido à rotatividade de algumas pessoas que foram substituídas, algumas dificuldades foram encontradas com relação à históricos anteriores de projetos/processos.Mudança no time de vendas, gerenciamento de projetos, passei a ter dificuldade ao receber os processos corretamente, com erros em dados financeiros de contratos, por exemplo, ou falta de documentos, impactaram em retrabalhos e demanda de tempo maior no registro e correções, aliado a dificuldade operacional do SAP. Passei por di
ProsBeneficios, treinamentos.
ConsMultinacional com algumas áreas retrogradas em processos e gestão.
My work as technical support in ABB is balanced between office work and site work. I have learnt theory and practical of electrical power system in ABB. I appreciate the accessibility to the substation and panel builder factory to experience the real system of electrical power. The knowledge is enhanced with the theory of it which is vast in ABB intranet plus online training, webinar and online support which is available and updated from time to time. Being technical support, I also get the opportunity to have direct contact with protection relay specialist in ABB headquarters in Finland. This broadens my horizons and view on the work scope as a whole. ABB dedicates a specific role to a person so I focus only on protection relay at ABB. This gives me ample space to dig and deepen my knowledge in this area. ABB also comprise the whole scope of electrical power e.g automation, switchgear, LV product where I can always get in contact with peers who works in that team in ABB so I can know the inter-relation of my field to theirs. The hardest part of the job is to get approval of relay with utility like TNB and SEB which require a lots of things to do including documentations in such a long period of time. This will incur a lot of cost before we can actually start selling our product to the utility to earn profit. The most enjoyable part of the job is going outstation where I get opportunity to go to other places and my job task is varying depending on demand or job task so I don'
ProsFlexible time, can take half day leave, allocation of travelling day for outsation, site allowance, hardship allowance
Conssite allowance not updated, low annual increment, less benefit, less secure job (chance to get VSS)
The firsts thing you’ll notice when you start working here is the conditions of the inside.
Floors are a wreck, if you operate an order picker or reach truck you might as well go run a jackhammer. Sections of floor are busted down to the sand.
Rollers on modules were never repaired, racks are busted daily, every single rack leg is damaged, conveyor belts or ripped, dock doors left wide open.
Maintenance does absolutely nothing for 90% of the day. If you want to work maintenance this IS for you, you can sleep, play on your phone, eat snacks and get away with doing only the most trivial work for a day, maintenance has been moved to a back corner far away from everyone else now so it’s even better for them to catch sleep.
Management is a joke. Their only concern is orders going out, no matter how difficult it becomes to push them out. Their backwards ideas consistently delay other areas which later causes another delay in orders going out. They cannot keep employees at the shipping dock, if you go in as a order filler you are likely to end up on the shipping dock because everyone walked out. Shipping is back breaking because you HAVE to go fast and bend from line to floor, there is no way to ergonomically move product at that speed. They have NO pallet stands to relieve any strain. They exhaust you with no weekends off ever.
Supervisors and leads sit and stare at a monitor and their phones all day and their highest degree of work is getting on the radio to let you know it’s
Buena empresa que cuidava a sus trabajadores, en donde aprendí mucho más a trabajar en cadena de producción y en los almacenes de la fabrica.
ABB MOTORS era una multinacional de ámbito mundial, que en comparación con otras empresas, cuidaba aun más a sus trabajadores.
En ABB MOTORS, es donde completé bastante mi formación como operario de producción y sobretodo como operador logístico. Donde aprendí a manejar todos los tipos de carretillas, el puente grúa, el sistema de gestión erp sap, y la planificación de trabajo de los almacenes de ABB motors. ABB a mí me ha aportado mucho. El día a día en el trabajo era empezar a las 6h, ya a primera hora te venían los peones de las diferentes secciones de fabricación para pedir material, así durante toda la jornada. A las 8h de la mañana, ya empezaban a llegar los transportistas trayendo material para descargar. Se descargaba el material y se dejaba apilado en espera para verificar la calidad y posteriormente ubicarlo y plasmar la ubicación informáticamente.
Con la dirección y gerencia no había mucho contacto, cosa normal en una gran multinacional. De vez en cuando nos hacían charlas de como marchaba económicamente ABB motors.
Hice muchos amigos en esta empresa pero sobretodo estaba centrado en el trabajo.
La parte más difícil del trabajo era cuando había exceso de faena, ya que al estar en el turno de la mañana, se descargaba muchos camiones y había que alternarlo con las faenas de realización de pickings, material extra que pedían los peones de las secciones de producción, plasmar datos en SAP, ectra, aunque me adapte bastante bien a este ritmo de trabajo.
Lo que más
ProsHabía buena coordinación entre las diferentes secciones.
ConsLas instalaciones eran antiguas y estava pendiente de modernizarlas. El menú comedor era barato.
Detail Design Engineering and FEED studies for Industry
Competency in following areas which includes:
Key and detailed Single line diagrams (SLD)
Design calculations: Equipment sizing, cables, Grounding, Illumination, Lightning
Technical Specifications, data sheets,Layouts
Cable Engineering: Sizing, lists, schedules, routing.
Interconnection diagrams
Study of existing equipment and systems and propose retrofits with switchgear extensions, drives and Power Management system integration etc.
Power system studies for retrofit projects including verification of protection settings.
Pre Bid engineering/ FEED (Front End Engineering Design) Studies
Project Life cycle support with detailed engineering studies.
Basic Engineering including Equipment sizing, Design basis, Data sheets and Technical specifications
Load flow, short circuit, Protection coordination, Dynamic motor starting, harmonic analysis and arc flash studies,System & Switchgear sizing, System engineering including Schematics, Layouts, Schedules
Detailed Engineering including Review of Vendor drawings and customer approvals for MV/LV Switchgear, Drives and Transformer and auxiliary equipment.
Preparation of Bill of Quantities /Material takes off (BOQ/MTO)
Engineering and documentation
Review of Technical & Commercial bid and Engineering Estimation for DCS, Electrification, Instrumentation, VFD Systems
Our team is working closely with various LBUs across the Globe in Marines, Mining and Industry solutions that inc
Loved the benefits, management caused a high turn over rate
Thomas & Betts is a plastic injection molding factory, I worked in an area refereed to as L cell, where we primarily made plastic electrical boxes. I would come into work, the team lead would tell me my assigned press and you get straight to work. With how they strive for a consistent quality of plastic, they only shut the press down when they absolutely need to, and you must thoroughly check the quality of every part. That didn't necessarily make the job difficult, just made it have a higher learning curve than most, being that we would rotate to a different press everyday, and they all have unique operations. Some presses were parts going straight out of the press, adding a upc, and boxing. Most involved the parts going into a screw setter, where different components are added to the parts. The screw setter added a lot of more complications to how quality can be sub par. I started the job with it having a high turn over rate, and it was that way throughout my experience there. Meaning, new people were constantly coming in and learning these presses, while being switched to a new one everyday they came in, to them eventually quitting out of frustration of constantly being criticized by management for not keeping up with regular employees. With me gaining knowledge of the various presses, and the high turn over rate, I became a permanent trainer. I enjoyed every aspect of training, specifically motivating new employees to not give up and always believe in themselves. Noticing
ProsHealth Benefits, steady hours
ConsManagement that had trouble adapting
Questions and answers about ABB
How often do you get a raise at ABB?
Asked Nov 28, 2022
1 fois par année
Answered Aug 2, 2023
Par année
Answered Jul 9, 2023
How often do raises occur at ABB?
Asked Mar 10, 2022
Annuellement
Answered May 24, 2023
Le même salaire pendant 3
Answered Mar 30, 2023
What questions did they ask during your interview at ABB?
Asked Oct 31, 2017
The interest was on my job experience, writing and speaking skills.
My drawback was on my limited Swedish skills, even though English is official, but most communications were done in Swedish.
Answered Feb 1, 2019
What is your qualification ?
where u work before ?
