Moving is living - one more step ahead towards our digital transformation

 Good morning all You highly esteemed readers of my posts here in my blog. 

Once again I have decided to share some personal & professional experiences with You. This time I will talk about a subject, which very often is not very much welcome by people. But in my case, I have really enjoyed  all these challenges and experiences.

Last week, during my "factory day", I have cleaned up my office at our wonderful company in Itatiba, so that our maintenance team can get started on tearing it down. Together with my colleagues Luis Traúzola, Vice President Admin/Finance, and Ferdinand Senske, Vice President Operations, I have decided, to give up our current 3 individual offices and to construct instead of these a modern, shared, open space, co-working office, where we altogether may use any of the 3 office desks to be installed there, whenever we visit our factory and work there. 

The idea to do so has clearly been generated based on our experiences during the so far almost 12 months long hybrid working schemes due to the threat from Covid-19. Since I have started to work mainly from my home office in Vinhedo in March 2020, I have visited our factory just for 1 day every 2-3 weeks and this has prooven fully suficient and efficient for me and my professional activities. 

Luis works at his office at our factory at least 1 day per week and Ferdinand, due to his high involvement in all operations activities on the shopfloor, works at our factory normally during 2-3 days per week. Thus we meet personally altogether at my office in our factory during 1 day just once every 2-3 weeks, which is fully suficient and keeps us perfectly aligned. For sure, we altogether meet regularly and individually during lots of internal and external online conferences every week, which makes our work rythm extremely focussed and productive. 

When I started to clean up my office, I at first opened the few cupboards there and I was astonished, how many folders, printed documents and books, which I had collected over the last 6 years without really ever using them again, I found there. This showed me, that the digitalisation process of my work had already started several years ago, not least because of my strongly increasing business travelling activities and the resulting repeated and long absence periods from my office and our company, which anyhow oblidged me to use digital archives on my notebook and on our corporate servers instead of physical documents, folders and books. 

Thus the decision, to throw all these cupboard objects in the trash, was very easily and immediately taken. I just had to seperate the items in different cardboard boxes, so that different materials could afterwards be disposed correctly and environment friendly according to our internal waste sorting system.

And another decision confirmed immediately. I would no longer need any cupboards for documents, books etc. in our co-working office. Just a little closed space for storing my safety boots and a handful other personal items. 

In the lay out for our new beautiful co-working office, which I will share in the future with Luis and Ferdinand, we have foreseen one small, cosy  multipurpose office for 2 persons and a small, but also cosy, meeting room for 3 persons. These 2 rooms shall give each of us the the option, to retreat from the co-working space to a more intimate and quiet place, where we will be able to do fone calls, have confidential conversations with 1 or 2 other colleagues or just relax a little, whenever needed. My own former office will be converted into a very nice, modern, professional meeting room for up to 10 participants. And on the glazed terrace in front of my former office will - once the Covid-19 threat has been overcome - serve us perfectly for guest receptions, coffee (for sure You remember, that I prefer black tea) breaks and business lunches. 

The redesign of our offices is just one small part of our overall "Factory of the Future" concept for Vulkan do Brasil, within which we will step by step accomplish the digital transformation of our our company. This will bring us up to a completely new level of excelence and performance and will enable us, to attend our customers even better than we do already today. I will present other important components of our dital transformation project to You during my next posts.

Above, at the very beginning of this post, I mentioned that people very often don`t like to leave their offices and clean them up before leaving. For sure, many of the people are doing this because their retirement has come and - even much better comprehensible - all those who have to leave their offices because of their dismissal - hate to abandon their former offices.

In my case I had become quite used to movals together with my familly during my childhood, when we changed the places of our residence quite a couple of times. Later-on, during my professional career, to move to a new location, many times in a far away, new country, has always been a highly appreciated event for me. And in this sense I always celebrated to clean up and give back my offices. And I also always took these situations as highly welcome opportunities to rid myself of no longer needed items and document collections from the past and thus empty space for new things to come. 

That`s the reason, why I am really excited and happy, that Luis, Ferdinand and I have taken this important decision and that we and our company will accomplish once again a very important personal & professional development and growth step. It`s fully true - I can`t wait for stepping into our new co-working office areas for the first time. And no doubt - I will share this experience here with You. 

It did not take me long, to come to the conclusion, that the traditional irish folk music song "The leaving of Liverpool", here in a live version recorded about 50 years ago at the famous Royal Albert Hall in London, would fit very nicely to the above expressed subject.

The Dubliners were an Irish folk band founded in Dublin in 1962, which was very successfully popularizing Irish folk music allover Europe and gained lots of important music awards incl. the 2012 BBC folk music award.

https://youtu.be/2Ed9p_UBFCo

In fact Irish Folk Music has become quite popular amongst students in Germany during the 70s of the last century and has also brought the first "Irish Pubs" and their wonderful Guiness and Kilkenny beers to my country. But this was also the time, when the terrible violence between protestants and catholics, Irish nationalists and British unionists, was at the climax in Northern Ireland. Thanks god this nightmare has finally come to its peaceful end in 1998. 

I hope this was interesting for You and - like always - I am very curious for receiving Your feedback and comments.

Take care! Stay happy and healthy! I wish You lots of fun and success for Your next weeks business challenges and opportunities. See You again back here soon.