Three locations – one team: our Hapag-Lloyd IT

The IT department is growing: Hapag-Lloyd currently employs around 900 IT specialists – with the target being 1,200, evenly distributed between Hamburg, Gdańsk and Chennai. Despite all their similarities, the locations differ in their tasks and individual areas of focus.

The Digital Port in Hamburg

All the threads come together in Hamburg: In November 2022, IT moved into its new offices in the heart of the city – barely 350 metres from the headquarters on the Ballindamm. On seven floors, more than 470 people work on innovative hardware and software solutions for container shipping, operate our servers and communication networks, and ensure the necessary cybersecurity. From there, the team also coordinates the collaboration with our colleagues in Gdańsk and Chennai. THE ULTRA-MODERN BUILDING is equipped with numerous New Work features and has been carefully tailored to the needs of the employees. All levels are equipped with wellthought-out soundproofing solutions to ensure a pleasant working environment. Thanks to the SMART Building technology used in its construction, the relative energy consumption of the building is around 30 per cent lower than before the recent refurbishment. All materials used – flooring, walls, desks, and so on – follow the cradle-to-cradle concept. “We started the whole project from home during the Covid-19 pandemic,” explains Niklas Heimbokel, Director IT Digital Talents. “We knew that even after the pandemic, we would need fewer on-site workstations. This has worked very well so far and has been positively received. We have onboarded almost 100 new colleagues in Hamburg this year, and our building has been a big plus in attracting them.”
 

The Knowledge Center in Gdańsk

The Knowledge Center was established in 2019, with the IT team as its largest internal unit. Today, the facility houses almost 230 IT professionals, with plans for further growth in the coming years. The diverse teams are working on everything from process automation to artificial intelligence and blockchain solutions. “We created an office setup that fosters creativity,” says Adam Sikorski, Site Leader of the Knowledge Center. “You can think of IT professionals as artists, creating products from scratch and adding value to our organisation, and we treat them as such.”

Within the Knowledge Center, different IT and non-IT functions have the opportunity to collaborate and develop their inherent synergies. A prime example would be the ooperation between the Dangerous Goods Validation and the Robot Process Automation teams: “As the result of a casual conversation in the office kitchen, one of the first solutions built by the Robot Process Automation team was a bot that processes dangerous goods transactions,” Adam Sikorski explains. “It is great that we get to witness collaborations between different teams like that.”

The Technology Center in Chennai

Recently, in November 2023, Hapag-Lloyd launched its third IT site in the eastern Indian port city of Chennai. It will be operated as part of a joint venture that Hapag-Lloyd established with long-time partner Solverminds. The team, currently comprising 180 IT professionals, will develop innovative software solutions. For the time being, the focus is on the ongoing FIS3 transformation, but the goal is to broaden the scope in the future.

“As a port city, Chennai has always been an important business hub, and, in recent years, it has become a major centre for software solutions,” says Balamurugan Palanivelu, CEO of the new joint venture. “All these factors – port, business, software – offer us the perfect environment for our Technology Center and for developing smart software solutions. We look forward to intensely interacting with Hapag-Lloyd’s global IT teams.” Florian Liebetrau, Integration Lead for the Technology Center, further elaborates: “During our IT Forum for example, we interactively connect the three offices via video conferencing, with several hundred colleagues viewing and listening in. We present topics that come up here to our colleagues in the other locations and vice versa, and involve people in town halls and festivities. The goal is to create one cohesive IT department that works as a seamless unit across all three locations.”