Meet Our Community MVP of the Month for February 2026!
Hi there, Community!
We’re excited to continue our Community MVP (Most Valuable Player) spotlight series—an initiative that highlights the outstanding individuals who consistently support others, share their expertise, and help make this community such a valuable place to learn and grow.
For our third MVP feature, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Alexander Dilg, a long‑time Plant Simulation expert, mentor, and dedicated Community Catalyst. Alex’s deep knowledge and experience have made him an invaluable resource to members across the globe, and we’re thrilled to share more of his story and insights.
Let’s dive into our conversation with Alex…
1. You’ve spent more than 15 years working with Plant Simulation—long before formal Communities existed. How have you seen the idea of “Community” evolve over the years, both within Siemens and across the broader engineering world?
It’s probably just me being nostalgic, but I feel like Communities used to have more engagement beyond “please someone help me fix this issue”. So I greatly appreciate your efforts to bring back more engagement. I am very curious to see how our Community evolves with the further rise of AI and copilots. I hope this field is still complex enough to benefit from actual humans helping each other out.
2. Many community members appreciate how clearly you explain Plant Simulation concepts. What’s your approach to making complex topics easy to understand?
Since many users lack coding experience, I always try to find low-code or no-code solutions first, based on the basic functionality. That is not always easy, as we experts often prefer to “just code it myself”.
3. As a Community Catalyst, what motivates you to invest so much time in supporting fellow engineers? And in what ways has the Community supported you in return?
I like to see the growth of other community members and be a part of their journey in the world of simulation. And ideally they get to a point where they can in turn help other beginners with the knowledge they’ve gained in the community. My greatest personal takeaway is whenever the Siemens developers share additional background or technical context about certain features or implementations. These deeper explanations—often too detailed or specialized for the formal documentation—are always valuable insights from an expert user’s perspective.
4. You’re an expert in Plant Simulation and related topics. For new or aspiring community members—especially those entering this field—what is the one message or piece of advice you’d most like them to take away?
Steffen gave the good advice to always start small and simple – then grow it from there. I would further suggest to always start out with a proper concept, before going into the implementation. You should first write down clearly what you want to simulate and how the system should behave. What rules the process should follow and what happens in specific situations? What is important and what can maybe be added in a second or third phase? This is the same process we follow as experts – first we write a specification, then we plan the implementation and lastly we actually implement it.
5. Outside of engineering, you’ve lived in Shanghai and learned Mandarin. You also play and help manage a Foosball club. Which one was more challenging: learning Mandarin or learning how to play Foosball and why?
If you ask me about the learning itself, I’d have to say Mandarin. However, I approached these challenges with a different mindset: I knew learning Chinese was going to be challenging and I knew that I had nothing to build upon – my knowledge of German, English and French wasn’t going to help me. But when I first stepped up to a professional Foosball match, I went into it thinking I was already pretty good. I was proven wrong very quickly and painfully, but Foosball has a great community and they helped me get better at it.
