When you’re growing as quickly as Intuitive, training is critically important—and that’s where team members such as Hannes Pries (Manager, Production, Endoscopes), Georgi Ralenekov (Assembler, Endoscopes), and Roman Stellbogen (Lead Assembler, Endoscopes) come in. Below, the three teammates explain how they’re working together to share knowledge with their teammates in Emmendingen, Germany; launch a new team in Parvomay, Bulgaria; and help patients all over the world.
What do you do at Intuitive, and what brought you here?
Georgi: I assemble endoscopes, which are the eyes of da Vinci robotic surgery systems. I like to say I grew up with this line of work—my hometown in Bulgaria had a large optical production site, as well as a school. I started working there for Schölly Fiberoptic in 2018, and Intuitive was our largest customer, so I already knew about the company and the vision for the future. Then in 2022, when Intuitive started planning a new Bulgaria location, I had the chance to join and come here to Emmendingen to train.
Since then, I’ve learned a lot of different work operations in different departments, from assembly to calibration. I spent a year as a leader on the production line, became a trainer, and for the past couple of months I’ve also been working with our team that does analysis when something isn’t working on an endoscope before we ship it out. That problem-solving has been really interesting. I’ve enjoyed the creativity of it.
Hannes: I’m Manager of the Production Task Force, which handles training—including cross-training, so team members can shift from one operation to another as needed. I started my career as an apprentice here in Germany, and worked at Panasonic and Lufthansa, where I built a lot of what you’d see in the cockpit of a plane, and then I joined Schölly in 2010.
At Schölly I started out in the production team, then moved to R&D where I helped implement the next-generation endoscope. Before Intuitive acquired Schölly locations in Germany, I left the company to gain more insight in how other companies work. Then in 2019 I was offered the chance to lead the sub-assemblies in our production line, and I helped with the smooth transfer from Schölly to Intuitive. After that I went on to become the manager of the Production Task Force team.
Roman: I’m a lead trainer on Hannes’ team, and I also joined through the Schölly acquisition five years ago. Before optics, I worked as an orthopedic mechanic, assembling prosthetics—I’ve always liked to work with my hands. Here, I started out in the sub-assembly group, then moved into cable production. I think at this point I’ve been trained in about 85 percent of our endoscope production processes.
Day to day, I sometimes run my own training sessions, but most of my time is organizing things for our training team. There are nine of us, and I work with managers in different departments to make sure we are providing the support their teams need.
What’s the training experience like for new team members?
Roman: When someone joins, we start by introducing them to the Intuitive culture and making sure they understand our standards for quality, which are very high. They may not have built medical devices before, and we want to instill in everyone just how important it is to be precise. The endoscopes we make will go into the bodies of patients.
Hannes: Documentation is also part of the culture. It’s important that we record the steps we take to build these systems—because, as Roman said, they will be helping real people.
Roman: When we introduce new employees to the operations they’ll learn, we start with demonstrations by trainers, so they can see what’s happening and hear the explanation—and ask any questions they have. Then they’ll get practical, hands-on training, where they’re building parts themselves, but with their trainer there to support them.
We require at least six training repetitions for each operation, and how long that takes depends on the difficulty—for some, you’re trained in a day or two, but others take two weeks. In our particle clean room, for example, new employees need time to develop a sense of how to handle different particulates and how clean the lenses need to be.
Hannes: We’ve done hundreds of trainings now, so we have good data on the average times we should expect—but we don’t determine whether people are trained based on time. Every employee is different, and it’s up to the trainer to decide when someone is ready to be on their own.
What do you like best about leading a team at Intuitive?
Hannes: I love that we bring together so many different cultures, both between all our locations and in our people themselves. Leading here is different than in the U.S. or Mexicali, and now in Bulgaria. For example, change happens at different speeds in the different locations. But in the end, it’s one set of standards, and we work companywide together to adapt and make sure we’re doing what is best for our local teams.
And here in Emmendingen, we have at least 20 different countries represented in our Particle Control Room alone! We communicate in German, English, Bulgarian—sometimes it sounds crazy, but we do whatever works best for the people while in the conversation. Everyone helps each other.
Georgi: Yes, language was a challenge for me when I first joined, but people were very patient. I’ve enjoyed getting to talk with people from different parts of Germany, too. That’s helped me learn. I’m very happy that I’ve had the chance to do that.
Hannes: That’s something else I enjoy about being a leader here—seeing people grow. Step by step, week by week, you can feel it, and it makes you feel like anything is possible. I remember feeling that way when I joined, and now I love seeing the same thing happen for other members of our team.
Georgi: As a trainer, I always enjoy checking in on someone I trained a few weeks later, and seeing how much they’ve improved. That gives me joy. It makes me feel confident that I did well helping them.
Roman: I’m happy when a plan is successful, and when we reach a goal. Not just production goals—we do want to deliver a certain quantity of endoscopes, but we also want to make sure each department has the number of operators they need, and that we cross-train people, so they get the experience they want, and we have flexibility if a certain line needs more support. That’s my challenge on a daily basis, deciding how to distribute our resources and keep all of the different teams happy. It never gets boring!
What does Intuitive’s mission mean to you and your teammates?
Roman: Getting to help people means a lot to us, especially because we know our employer is the leader in this field. And we’ve been able to see the results firsthand—at one of our all-hands meetings, for example, we had a special guest, the father of one of our colleagues in production. He’d had surgery using a da Vinci system, and it was very impressive to hear what his experience was like and what a difference it made for him. They even found the serial number of the endoscope that was used and shared which assemblers had built it. It was a good reminder that, as we often tell our team members, the device used in any surgery could be the one you worked on.
Georgi: And so many of us have seen firsthand what life is like without the da Vinci, too. A friend had a traditional open surgery years ago, and it took two months to heal. With minimally invasive surgery, people are up and get to go home much sooner. That’s really impressive. And it’s motivational, too, to know that we’re helping people in that way, every day.
Hannes: Absolutely, knowing that the endoscopes we deliver help people all over the world—that motivates me to keep pushing to improve our processes and make things even better. The more we can produce, the more people we can help.
What are you looking forward to in the months and years to come?
Georgi: In the short term, we’re working on plans to train more employees like me, who will be visiting from Bulgaria. And then when our new plant in Parvomay is ready early next year, I’m planning to move back and help start production there. That’s going to be really interesting, and I’m looking forward to sharing what I’ve learned. It will be nice to be back, too. I’ve enjoyed the past couple of years here, but home is home.
Hannes: I’m also looking forward to training more of our Bulgarian team and fine-tuning how we support them. I love optical production, and building up those structures and standards feels like a way to share that with my colleagues.
Roman: I’m looking forward to opening our new building here, and to traveling more for work. I got to spend two weeks at Intuitive headquarters in Sunnyvale last year, and it was an adventure—so interesting. I’m 100 percent sure I want to stay here. I have my girlfriend, my hobbies, my friends, and my cats. But if I have the chance to visit Georgi and his colleagues in Bulgaria, or go to another location, I’m absolutely open to that.
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