When Fortaco’s Szilvia Sándor joined the Jászberény team it was a bit like coming home.

“Life is sometimes strange,” says Szilvia Sándor, Finance Manager for Fortaco Group’s Jászberény business site. Strange, because joining the company in 2020 was something of a homecoming for her: Szilvia’s father worked in the same plant for almost 40 years.

“The Jászberény plant has been around since 1951,” she says, “and before the multinational era my father was a turner and machine operator in the plant. I vividly recall spending summers at the factory’s holiday house at Lake Balaton. I remember lots of happy people together, warm water, and the weather was always perfect. It isn’t true, of course, but that’s how memory works. I also spent my last semester from university in the factory and wrote my thesis about Aprítógépgyár, the name of the Jászberény business site before Fortaco.”

2020: Not quite utopia

After supervising the move of an Electrolux factory from Hungary to China – and the elimination of her own job – Szilvia landed at Fortaco, as head of the finance department, in September of 2020. The factory was familiar, but the pandemic had made it less of the utopia she remembered as a student.

2020 had been a rough year. “Orders had dropped and production was at a low level,” she says. “We were working four days per week, instead of five, during that summer. We were experiencing losses and operating in a mode to build for the future.

But 2021 was different. “2021 was a recovery period for us. Production is still increasing, we won lots of new business with both existing- and new customers. The good news was that the value of orders was already higher than we could meet.”

Growing fast

In the second half of 2021, and in 2022, everything was looking up. “We’re staffing up, increasing machine capacity, which is challenging for us,” Szilvia says. “It was very exciting, but it was also a time to be cautious: growing fast needs extra attention.”

Szilvia says growth can be complicated. “Growth is easy if you just keep your prices, but you have to make sure growth is profitable. We’re seeing increased raw material prices, high energy prices and customers queueing for products. To be profitable we have to monitor ourselves carefully, choosing customers and products prudently.” Fortunately, she says, Fortaco customers understand that the post-Corona manufacturing environment is different and complex.

Getting the ‘right price’

Since Szilvia joined Fortaco she’s been able to build her team, as well, adding a chief accountant, finance assistant, and controller. Her team’s work is critical in this quick-changing environment, and they check financial results and do cost forecasts on a monthly basis. “There’s a plan,” she says, “and then there’s reality. The nature of business is that unexpected things happen – a machine will break down, or Corona will cause fewer workers on the CNC machine.” 

In 2022, her team implemented Fortaco’s Right Price Project. The project, already used in Fortaco factories, is an SAP development program which enables very clear margins both per project and per customer. “This program allows much more information to be collected at the product- and customer levels. It will ensure that we’re always offering the right price to our customers.”

The lake community

The house at Lake Balaton is still owned by Fortaco and, aside from some basic improvements, it looks very much the same as it did during Szilvia’s youth. While she hasn’t visited the house, she still is very much looking forward to rebuilding what the house symbolizes to her: the Fortaco community.

“Corona and the year 2020 have done a lot to separate us physically,” she says. “People split up in order to not meet each other. We worked different days at the office so we wouldn’t interact. There was no Christmas dinner.” But the normal life was returning. “Corona was not easy from the point of view of team spirit. And I knew, we’re coming back.”