Employee stories: Interview with developer Georg

During my early days at JTL, I was involved in pure JTL-Wawi development, including solutions such as JTL-Workflows and the Amazon Lister or the first JTL-WMS mobile version. When we launched the JTL-Fulfillment Network, JTL-FFN for short, about five years ago, I developed the concept and the first version together with our Managing Director at the time, Thomas Lisson, among others. In the meantime, there is a complete team that takes care of the JTL-FFN and I am still part of this task force. However, we also look after other areas such as returns processes, customer details in JTL-Wawi and our automation tool JTL-Workflows.

You could say that.

I studied computer science with Thomas Lisson in Aachen. We had the same circle of friends and knew each other from the odd party. At that time, Thomas had already started to found the company. We thought: Will this JTL thing work out? As we know, he convinced us all! (laughs)

Before joining JTL, I programmed for an agricultural machinery wholesaler and took care of the online store, among other things. After a while, however, I wanted a career change. That’s when Thomas bidder offered me to come over. The team still consisted of about 25 people. I immediately felt at home. Not only because I knew other JTL colleagues from my school days, but also because it was a perfect fit for me professionally.

Definitely! That sounds strange, but at times it didn’t feel like work. We programmed together, developed ideas and launched exciting projects, but we also did a lot of things together – from barbecues and table football to billiards and poker. It was great fun – like studying, but earning money.

We normally work in classic SCRUM sprints. These are defined by the product owner who is responsible for the respective solution. He or she determines which tickets are to be processed in which priority during the sprint period. Before each sprint, we discuss each ticket as a team and then divide up the work accordingly. As programmers, we also support the support team when it comes to bug fixing or technical issues. The collaboration between IT and support is always very close at JTL. This ensures that we develop our solutions precisely in line with our customers’ needs.

Precisely! We are constantly coordinating with each other. Well-considered plans are particularly important for more complex things. That’s why we sometimes sit down together and think about the best way to approach programming. We’ve also tried pair programming for one project or another.

In my view, you need a good understanding of our central product JTL-Wawi and how the ERP system interacts with our other solutions. From ERP and warehouse management to the point of sale system – everything is closely interlinked. The different areas must therefore also be coordinated with each other. Interface compatibility is one of the most important quality features of our solutions. That’s why even the most precise ticket doesn’t take away the work of asking which areas could still be affected if you change something. But that’s also the exciting thing for me.

Let’s take the topic of shipping processes. If you change a programming code, you need to know exactly what is happening. Simply “writing it down” does not work in most cases. You also have to ask yourself questions like: What is necessary for the system to generate an invoice or a delivery bill? Which functionalities in JTL-Wawi are responsible for this?

As an IT specialist, I’ve always been a big fan of automation. If I can contribute to something that saves customers hours of work, that makes me really happy. That’s why I think JTL-Workflows is so great. The product has become my baby to a certain extent, because I was involved in its development from the very beginning. But I’ve also grown fond of the JTL-Fulfillment Network. Numerous retailers and fulfillment service providers are now working successfully with it. At the same time, there are still so many ideas that we want to implement. We are far from finished!

Of course, there have also been difficult phases in the last ten years. But overall, the team community is something that carries us through such times. At the moment, for example, we realize that we need more new colleagues. That’s why I’m holding this interview here, to get potential applicants interested in our work.

Because we have constantly grown and developed new solutions in recent years, JTL also gives you the opportunity to “let off steam on a greenfield site” and help shape things from the very beginning. I can live out my creativity as a developer.

I can determine the scope of my work myself and am very flexible. I also never had the feeling that I was being pressured from above or that decisions were simply made and had to be followed. JTL is keen to ensure that the workforce is behind the common direction of travel and is doing Good.

When I’m not working, my two children keep me on my toes. My son is now three years old and my daughter will soon be one year old. The fact that we can now choose flexibly between working from home and the office has made it easier to organize family life. I get to see almost every step of my children’s development and can be there for them more.

I’m also very busy renovating our house, which we bought last year in January. We had actually planned to just renovate a bit, but then more and more building sites opened up all by themselves. Fortunately, we found good tradesmen through my brother.