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For the past 2 and a half years, I have been working at a freight transport railway company as an applications specialist in the Digital Innovation Department.
When I was hired, the most important factor in my being chosen was the fact that I had worked for almost 9 years as a Software Engineer at a company that specialized in software for railway companies, related to resource planning and management (people and material).
By the way, at that time, I was involved in a project that was underway for my current employer, which was almost 8 years ago.
When I had my interview, they told me that our mission would be to improve the company's existing processes and digitize them, since there are processes managed in Excel and with a lot of human intervention, which does not allow for reliable data for management decision-making.
However, I was soon told that my first task would be to take over the operation management software for the branch in Spain, which was orphaned, that is, no one was taking care of its development or error correction because it was handed over to operations.
The first challenge was the language barrier, since no one in Spain was comfortable with English and I had no knowledge of Spanish.
This was the first situation that took me out of my comfort zone, but now I can say that it made me evolve and gave me added value for the future.
Although the idea was to have worked in all the companies in the group, I ended up only working in the Spanish branch, because they had a number of processes being managed by several Excel files shared by email and by teams.
I have now managed to remove most of these Excel files from the business and all processes are now managed in the software.
During this time, we went from 15 desktop users to 150 mobile users and 55 desktop users.
I have lost count of the number of processes that are already managed in the software and are no longer managed because the supplier is not agile enough and does not have a solid knowledge base on their side.
I honestly feel proud of what I have achieved, but at the same time frustrated because I wanted to do more and my supplier does not help me.
Now I have another challenge, which is to also manage this software for the new branch that we have just opened in France.
Let's see how it goes, because although it is the same business, there are several points that are specific to each country, such as labor rules and the calculation of compensation according to the work performed.