Srdjan Jovanovic on HTEC Group’s Early Days and Rapid Growth
On the second day of the conference, HTEC Group hosted the workshop with students. At the beginning of the workshop, our Srdjan Jovanovic, VP of people operations, talked about how HTEC Group grew from a start-up company to a global technology leader and what are the fastest growing companies in the region. He also talked about all the different roadblocks, decisions and turning points in the company’s history. He emphasised the importance of building problem-solving skills and working proactively with our clients on the most innovative projects by not only building solutions but also by getting out from our comfort zones and participating in the decision-making processes.
The Workshop
To nurture the culture of problem-solving with students, the whole workshop was oriented not on solving a predefined technology challenge like these workshops tend to be, but it was posing more of a real-life problem in front of the students asking them how they would solve it from both a business and a technology standpoint.
Darko Todorovic presented to the students the case of how HTEC worked on digitalisation of the shipping sector, and how the company’s engineers worked with Stena’s executives to identify the challenges and proposed digital solutions that would optimize the operations of this company. Stena Orbit platform, which was developed by HTEC’s engineers, brings a new dimension by pioneering the digitalization of the tanker shipping industry. It was imagined and developed as a central point of everyday operations as it brings the complete overview of operating vessels and cargoes on those vessels.
Similarly, we asked the students to think about the last-mile delivery as a problem, and more specifically, to look at an example that is dear to their hearts and that they can understand well.
We told them to look at food delivery in Tuzla. Next, we gave them some parameters of the system (for example, a number of full-time employees versus number of part-time employees) and told them to think about how they would optimize last-mile delivery of food by both analysing the competition that’s currently existing on the market and by thinking of all the different challenges (such as moments when there are spikes of interest versus downtime) and how they would address them.
The students were divided in groups of four, and they worked for two hours with tech engineers from Tuzla on delivering their solutions. At the end, the students gave presentation where they discussed about what they have worked on for over the past two hours, and then, our team picked the best presentation. It was fascinating to see how much the students were able to accomplish in these two hours. They shared with us that this was a great opportunity for them to not only think as engineers, but to think of problems holistically and see the problem from all perspectives. For instance, they gave some creative solutions on how they would split the city in different zones, how they would organize city traffic (bike vs car). They even got to the point where they thought about the branding of HTEC, how they would market it and suggested some incentives for employees, which was also really exciting. On the whole, we didn’t discuss only engineering problems but also some topics that could be interesting for the business model of this company.
And interestingly, they understood most of the current local challenges that are causing delays in delivery of food quite well. They also obviously thought about how they would engineer solutions that would solve these issues. Overall, it was impressive to see how groups of students that had never met each other before became teams in their presentations in only two hours. They had different roles (like CEO, CTO, etc) and thought about different things like organizing the company, the marketing aspect, the branding aspect, the employee aspect, everything. And generally, the feedback was great, and it was a truly amazing experience.
Darko Todorovic on Building a Digital Mindset
After that, Darko Todorovic gave a keynote speech where he talked about the digitalization myth versus reality. He also tried to explain the difference between digitalization, digitization, and digital transformation. He concluded that digital transformation is a process that never ends. It’s a mindset that needs to be nurtured, especially in companies that haven’t had it before. He pointed out that the change starts from working with the company executive team on creating a digital transformation mindset and then identifying the potential solutions and ways how to implement them.
