Digital virtue emerges from necessity
Supply chains have entered a new era, as we know, due to new government regulations related to Covid-19. Training measures have also been affected. Switzerland’s Brabender Solutions was also hard-hit – a training course with Neska employees from all over Germany fell victim to the regulations. By mid-year Brabender’s new virtual classroom was ready for action – it will now be used permanently.
Once upon a time there was a little virus that suddenly made impossible face-to-face interaction during training – which was the Brabender Group’s daily bread. So the transport and logistics IT firm from Unterägeri (Switzerland) soon switched to online training. Its Mannheim site recently became the first to successfully complete a pilot project for Neska Schiffahrts- und Speditionskontor.
The first on-site training session was due to be held in Cologne in March, with participants from various locations. It was cancelled on account of Covid-19. “The new training system was implemented almost overnight – well in five days, to be precise. The concept was built from scratch,” Neska project manager Lukas Heinen told the ITJ in an interview. On 11 July the new ‘Brabender logistics suite’ went live punctually in Mannheim, with ten more locations in Germany to follow.
This reaction to the Covid-19 hygiene regulations had its advantages. Online instead of face-to-face training reduced the number of employees the provider needed per training session by 60%, from five to two days’, while maintaining the same group sizes.
Tests showed that the virtual classroom can also manage with complex logistics processes, such as multimodal transport processes in Neska’s logistics division. The logistics suite is used there as a transport management system (TMS) as well as as a warehouse management system (WMS), with all of the functions – a mix of short videos, exercises and exchanges, in short and flexible training sessions.
Long-term solution for the future
Heinen reported that “once the initial scepticism of the employees has been overcome, then Brabender’s solutions make a valuable contribution to changing corporate processes and even help to foster an overall digital mindset.”
But is Brabender’s ‘logistic suite online training concept’ born merely out of necessity, or is it also something of a solution for the future? “Yes, definitely,” CEO Thomas Brabender believes. “Thanks to confirmed efficiency and higher flexibility compared to classical classroom training courses, which additionally involve many long car, train or air journeys, we will probably offer the new concept to forwarding agents and logistics companies, many of which are already quite short of time.”
Brabender’s overall training platform is now scheduled to be ready for action by the end of this year – with personalised logins, examinations as well as learning certificates.