Delivering impact and competitive advantage

Background

Datwyler IT Infra is a leading and remarkable company in Switzerland founded in 1915. The industrial company was known until about a decade ago primarily as a manufacturer of cabling solutions, but since then it has undergone a fundamental transformation focussing its efforts on agility, digitisation, sustainability, and profitable growth. Today, Datwyler IT Infra employs about 1,000 people worldwide – in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and China – and operates as a solutions provider for IT infrastructures for data centres, fibre networks and intelligent buildings including software and services, and for the elevator/escalator business.

Challenge

The transformation phase of the company from a manufacturer of cabling solutions to an IT Infrastructure provider presents the management and the organisation with the challenge of expanding the core competences of the employees and providing them with an understanding of modern technologies through retraining.

“AI Business School is the ideal partner with leading experts and practitioners from leading national and international companies for our lifelong learning journey. The courses show many inspiring practical examples and use cases. During our education initiative, we collected incredibly interesting use cases for the usage of AI, data
and automation coming from the employees via the idea sourcing tool. After prioritizing the most relevant ones, we were enabled to directly start with pilots to transfer the learnings and ideas into practice.”

Adrien Bolliger, Managing Director Europe at Datwyler IT Infra

Solution

To successfully manage this change, Datwyler IT Infra invests in the training and development of its employees and in providing them with knowledge of new technologies and trends. They set impulses to become more efficient, to create new services and products, to improve their stakeholders’ understanding of the digital challenge, to bridge the gap between their own product and service portfolio and the needs of their customers. Strengthening the organisation in terms of these skills to think long-term, technology-driven and sustainable is the key of this education and training programme: “In the future, there will be hybrid teams consisting of people and machines. We have already started to use technologies like artificial intelligence, such as robotics or robotic process automation, and later machine learning, which take over tasks from employees or parts of them. Therefore, we have to take people along on the journey and explain to them that their job will change. We have to give them a perspective” says Adrian Bolliger and adds “the employees learn how to handle the new technologies and understand their benefits. We are creating an environment in the future that is human and machine instead of human against machines. We take this knowledge to our customers and support them in their IT projects. We are learning which pieces of the puzzle are still missing from our market offering and will therefore be added to in the near future.”

Outcome

Through their sophisticated upskilling program in collaboration with AI Business School, Datwyler IT Infra did not only create a unique, structed and sustainable lifelong learning process within the organization but also linked the learning and empowerment of leaders and employees with the theme of “impact” by concrete creation of business benefits. For example, after completing the first program cycle, Datwyler IT Infra employees came up with more than 20 great ideas through their newly initiated and bundled idea pipeline. Datwyler IT Infra then organised a contest where all participating employees could present their idea. An internal jury and the participants themselves were able to select the best ideas. In addition to the benefit for the company, the relation to AI and the presentation skills were also evaluated.

Adrian Bolliger,

Managing Director Europe at Datwyler IT Infra