Powerful Life

He’s an expert problem-solver

Isaac Inkabi’s road to OPPD spans three continents and thousands of miles. But the native of Ghana, has found a home in Omaha, and a reputation as the go-to guy to solve the unsolvable problems in his department.

As an endpoint engineer, his work helps a wide range of OPPD employees, from the engineers who design power plants and substations to the line technicians who work to restore power outages impacting OPPD’s customers.

Endpoint engineers work on the electronics devices OPPD employees use to do their jobs such as computers and iPads.

As OPPD’s digital transformation continues, employees with skills like Inkabi’s are increasingly vital.

Engineering aptitude

Inkabi said he was programmed to be an engineer early. He had a good role model at home. His father, also named Isaac Inkabi, was an electrical engineer who worked for Volta River Authority, Ghana’s main electricity generator and supplier, for more than 30 years.

In school, the younger Inkabi’s interests leaned toward science, math and computers.

“By 7, I was pretty good on the computer, and I just wanted to keep learning more,” he said.

When it was time for Inkabi to go to college, he decided to study in China. But first, he had to learn the language and take tests to prove his aptitude for reading it before he was accepted. Chinese became his third language after English and French.

China was one of the few countries at the time with schools offering a mechatronics degree, he said. He studied in China from 2011 to 2016, earning an engineering degree from Shandong University of Science and Technology in Qingdao, China. Inkabi said mechatronics combines mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering with electronics. He works with different kinds of engineering software.

“We know a lot but are the masters of none,” Inkabi said, describing those who work in the field.

Cultural differences

Inkabi learned a lot about work ethic in China. He said it was a matter of academic survival.

“The classes were so intense, no one slept,” Inkabi said. “In my school, if you worked 10 hours a day, you would fall behind.”

In America, he said, there is more individualism, more personal freedom. For example, students are given more freedom to decide for themselves what they want to study. China is more about the community, the collective, he said.

Outside of his class work, he fondly recalls his Friday night ritual of eating at roadside vendors, especially fried beef dumplings. He compared the vendors to the food trucks we have here, “except they were on bikes with shelves for the food.”

Inkabi, who has been with OPPD for more than two years, loves Nebraska. He feels people here are much more patriotic and proud of their origins compared to people in China.

Coming to the United States, though, meant getting used to some changes. Everyone seems to have a car and drives everywhere, and workdays are generally shorter., he said.

Another lesson for Inkabi was improving his “soft skills.”

“That was a big transition for me,” Inkabi said. “I learned you can’t be like a robot. The customer’s happiness also counts.”

In China there was little interaction in work environments. He gave the example of going to a bank teller in America compared to China.

“Here you have small talk, you ask about someone’s family or a pet,” he said. “In China there is none of that, it is just the transaction.”

Problem-solver

Endpoint engineers like Inkabi work with the digital tools OPPD employees use,  like laptops and software. They respond to service tickets – requests for assistance with software or a device – and solve problems for their fellow employees.

The best part of his job, Inkabi said, is that each service ticket Inkabi gets is different and poses different problems for him to solve.

His days are split between working on open service tickets from OPPD employees and longer-term projects related to the digital transformation underway at the utility.

One current long-term project involves making improvements to line technicians’ iPads to make the devices easier to use.

Inkabi said he strives to satisfy his clients, who are also his coworkers.

His supervisor has noticed.

“Isaac doesn’t shy away from anything,” said Brent Saltzman, manager of Endpoint Engineering at OPPD. “He’ll take on any project. He loves challenges.”

‘Isaac listens and cares’

When Inkabi started, four long-standing problems needed resolution. Inkabi solved each of them.

“He just knocked them out, one after another,” Saltzman said. “And these were tickets that had been floating around for more than a year. They’d bounced around to multiple different teams with no resolution. Isaac came in and just crushed them, to all of our amazement.”

For example, he recently resolved an issue with a program used by substation design engineers. The software problem meant that computer-aided design software projects took too long to open and close. What should have taken about 10 to 20 minutes took hours, Inkabi said.

Inkabi spent time troubleshooting and working with the program’s manufacturer to resolve the matter.

“I’m happy to say it now generally takes less than 10 minutes total to check the projects back in,” Inkabi said with pride.

Inkabi is now working on a schedule to update all of the programs the substation design engineers use.

“Isaac listens and cares; he treats each project like he has a stake in it,” said Lindsey Block, supervisor of Substation designers. “I’ve been working with him for a year on the different facets of our programs. He understands our needs and works to find the best way to make these products work for us.”