60 years with the masters of testing: Tomáš Hruška

This time, in our series “60 Years with Testing Masters,” we talked with Tomáš Hruška (CEO), who has been with SZÚ for three decades. How has the company culture evolved, what challenges has the era brought, and where are we headed next? You’ll find out all this in the following interview.

Like many other SZÚ employees, he came to the field of testing by chance. “When I graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Brno University of Technology in 1991, I already had a family and needed to earn a living. I came across an ad where SZÚ was looking for a testing technician.” Out of necessity, he found himself in a place where he has now spent thirty years of his professional life. “I don’t know anyone who, at the age of twelve, imagined they would become a testing technician.”

What were your responsibilities when you first joined?
I started in the group for gas household appliances. I was responsible for testing gas appliances, stoves, camping cookers, various heaters, and similar products. At first, I was quite frustrated because I tested several products for different customers, and not a single one passed. On the other hand, the nineties were very diverse in terms of testing – traditional manufacturers were disappearing, and a lot of new importers appeared, most of whom lacked technical expertise. Plus, everything that was imported or produced here was happily sold. Back then, we still worked under the law from 1968 and also tested the utility properties of products. For stoves, for example, we tested whether the oven really baked (and how), so we actually had to bake cakes or chicken, and the corridors of the Engineering Test Institute were filled with the smell of roasted meat. As a young and promising employee, I was tasked with comparing existing European standards with ours. I received Czech, French, and English standards and was curious about the French one, since they are such gourmets. And their standard said: Take a bundt cake mold, fill it with this type of sand, insert a thermometer, and if it reaches this temperature after a certain time, it’s fine. That disappointed me. The English requirement, on the other hand, said: Buy eggs of this quality from this royal supplier and prepare them according to this recipe.

Do you miss being a testing technician now that you’re in the director’s chair?
In the mid-nineties, I became head of the burner group. I thought that to stay in practice, I would fire up a boiler two or three times a year to test it, which turned out to be a naive idea. I don’t miss the technical work anymore. Technical development is moving very fast. The young employees we have here need to master incredible things with software, computers, and all virtual matters. To reach their technical level would take me a lot of effort. When I joined SZÚ, we still used town gas and tested for it, then switched to natural gas, alongside propane and propane-butane, and today hydrogen is coming in. So now we also test appliances for hydrogen. Thirty years is just a small slice of SZÚ’s existence, but during that time, both the industrial market and our company have undergone enormous changes.

What are you most proud of during your tenure?
I’m proud of the people we have here. We managed to change the company culture, the mindset of our people, attract new employees, and set up processes so that the company moved into the 21st century and was able to continuously identify and meet the needs of customers – manufacturing companies. Thanks to that, we make the world a safer place. One of the biggest projects was building new climate chambers, where we test heat pumps and acoustic parameters of various other products. It was also the largest investment we happened to make during the COVID period. Today, roughly one-fifth of our revenue comes from this area, but we already have to look further because heat pumps in Europe and worldwide are currently losing momentum, so we need to find new opportunities.

What helped you on your way up?
I think it was the need to understand everything – why things happen and how they happen – and also the ability to imagine how an idea will work. And then the focus on teamwork, which is related to employee selection and overall company culture. My professional background and experience probably played a role too.

This interview was created in cooperation with the editorial team of Reportáže z průmyslu magazine.

Thank you for the interview.

The SZÚ Team