Heading into the future together: Hermes Fulfilment explains digitization to the workforce via Microsoft Teams

The challenge: Get everyone on board for the digital transformation

Items arrive and then get packaged, picked, and prepared for forwarding. Large items are extracted from high-bay storage racks by machines, transported on conveyor belts, and scanned by automated devices. Smaller items are moved from A to B manually by employees and picked by hand. Everywhere you look, people are operating and servicing complex machines. All this is necessary so that the T-shirts, shelves, books—or whatever customers at home are desperate to get their hands on—get packed up into shipments. Hermes Fulfilment GmbH is well aware of the key role it plays: 6,000 employees at a total of 8 locations move 250 million shipments a year, supported by state-of-the-art technology.

“Warehouse operations aren’t confined to packaging and dispatching goods. There’s also a lot of hauling, scanning, picking, packing, unpacking, and shunting. It’s a massive symbiotic system comprising manual labor and automated machinery, and serves as the backbone of today’s superfast online retail world,” says Lutz Müller-Nyncke, Head of IT and CIO at Hermes Fulfilment GmbH. “And both the human and technical components of this system have to work well with each other. If a single component stops working, the whole operation grinds to a halt.” Digital systems and machines are becoming more and more integrated. Autonomous processes and objects have long since become a reality known as Logistics 4.0. Keeping pace with these developments isn’t always easy. “Digital transformation is the future,” Müller-Nyncke says. “That’s why it’s important for all our employees to have a basic understanding of the technology involved in digital transformation so that we can all journey together into our digital future. Our job is to remedy any worries our frontline employees might have.” To this end, Hermes developed a comprehensive training program it calls the Techucation Master Plan. In the program, videos explain the various aspects of digital transformation that participants will be tested on in order to receive a certificate. But it was harder to reach and inform warehouse employees than their office colleagues, who work with digital solutions every day. “In the past, communication in the warehouses was almost entirely analog, via stationary information screens, notices on bulletin boards, and team meetings,” Müller-Nyncke recalls.

He made it his mission to transform this world of analog communication and set himself a clear goal: “We wanted to find the simplest and most cost-effective way to reach as many frontline employees as possible and prepare them for the digital transformation so that they can join us in our digital future.” The tool of choice for this task was Microsoft Teams.

The solution: Microsoft Teams as a key to Logistics 4.0

Hermes Fulfilment GmbH knows that the only way to involve its frontline employees is with IT that can be operated easily and intuitively. That’s why it was essential to seamlessly integrate solutions into the Hermes Launchpad, from which all applications are started. “We have the Microsoft F1 license, which gives us Microsoft Teams and all online Office applications—all integrated directly into our existing Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure,” explains Stefan Kürschner, IT Service Delivery Manager at Hermes Fulfilment GmbH. All employees are entered in Azure Active Directory, each with their own user alias and one single password. Multifactor authentication adds further protection for these identities. “The combination of the F1 license and Azure Active Directory gives each of our employees a unique digital front-door key for all the applications they might need,” Kürschner says. In the future, the F1 license will also provide HR with key benefits. “It gives us a foundation on which to digitize HR processes. In the future, information, pay slips, stock options, and requests will be made available digitally through Teams. This will eventually allow us to make all these processes paperless,” Müller-Nyncke says. 

Microsoft Teams proved to be an enormous help in laying this foundation. At Hermes Fulfilment, the communication and collaboration platform is now the all-around support tool and the direct connection between management and all frontline employees. Teams is where the support team answers important questions, such as: How do I set up the security steps for logging in? “For our administrative staff, setting up multifactor authentication is now practically second nature,” Müller-Nyncke says. “But we wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving our frontline employees completely alone; this was quite simply new territory for them. So in the beginning, Teams was used mainly to connect frontline staff with the support team for assistance in configuring authentication processes.” On the platform, individual teams were created for certain topics, allowing the support team to respond to the questions posted there. All applications are available both at terminals in the warehouses and on personal devices. Using Microsoft Teams to help ensure that employees are up to speed is working well: around 5,000 have already been reached via Microsoft Teams in an effort to familiarize them with digital transformation. “We’ve also established a network of coaches—people with a lot of experience in working with our digital applications,” Kürschner says. “They serve as points of contact for anyone who needs a bit of help.”

Hermes Fulfilment intends to use Teams to reach even more of its staff about digital transformation going forward. More teams will be added to facilitate the dialogue between less experienced employees and the digital transformation experts. “Communication is key. We feel it’s essential to reach out to each person who works at our company and give them the opportunity to ask questions and express any concerns. We want to help everyone understand that with its robotics, digital twins, and cloud technologies, Logistics 4.0 will benefit all of us in the long run,” Müller-Nyncke says. “It’s the only way to allay people’s fears so we can journey together into our digital future. That way, no one gets left behind.”