Home office, mobile working, video conferencing – these have all been marginal topics up to now. With the first Corona-related lockdown on 23 March 2020, flexible work organisation moved to centre stage and with it the IT-side implementation. The eight-person IT department of Haeger & Schmidt Logistik (HSL) managed almost “overnight” to create the prerequisites to ensure the continuity of operations.
One of the first measures was to issue hardware boxes with equipment that the employees needed for their home office. As a rule, the boxes contained notebooks, mice, keyboards and cables. In parallel, for colleagues who used their home computers, the secure and flexible solution that was already in place before the pandemic was expanded via a central platform (Remote Desktop Services). In total, about 100 employees had to be enabled to work remotely.
“The introduction of the mobile workstations took place in three waves over a period of four weeks,” outlines IT Manager Martin Gläss and continues, “after achieving a stable operating situation, we took further optimisation measures, such as increasing the capacity of our central servers, procuring additional equipment and expanding the Internet connection.
From a technical point of view, however, the pandemic at HSL was not a major driver of digitalisation in the view of the IT manager: “We have been consistently involved in automation projects for about five years. These include the introduction of software in the port, the creation of interfaces and the further development of data management and integration.
integration.” Since the lockdown, however, the understanding and acceptance in dealing with the technologies has increased enormously.
Gläss is not worried that the IT department will be perceived less internally after the pandemic: “We are strongly integrated into the company’s business processes as business enablers because everyone is aware that part of the value creation comes from IT. We work in the logistics project teams at eye level.”