A.P. Møller – Mærsk A/S is a Danish shipping and logistics company, active in ocean and inland freight transportation and associated services, such as supply chain management and port operation.
The company is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, with subsidiaries and offices across more than 130 countries and around 100,000 employees worldwide in 2022.
The global company is constantly innovating and looking for the best solutions. Experience and cases of Maersk are interesting for other companies, and speakers are always expected at the largest conferences in the world. In Denmark, they say that working for Maersk is having a «lucky ticket». In the Ukrainian business environment, the company is also known as a reliable and powerful logistics operator.
I would like to talk about Maersk’s vision and approach. We met in Copenhagen at the tech conference TechBBQ with Siddhartha Kulkarni, Engineering Director at Maersk, and talked about some aspects of Maersk’s technology team.
Siddhartha, what is your personal story? How long have you worked at Maersk and what is the main reason for you to work for this company?
I have been employed with Maersk for about 6 years. But my association goes much longer than this. I’ve been into the technology consulting organizations, and we’ve been doing consulting for various large shipping, logistics and transportation companies, and Maersk was one of those. I first entered into the Maersk office almost 14 years back, and since then, I’ve been continuously working on different transformation programs for Maersk and finally joined Maersk 6 years back. I have looked at Maersk from both outside and within and I can confidently say Maersk is one of the best organizations to work for whether you work in technology or you are a core business execution person or have passion to build products. I have been enjoying my journey with Maersk a lot.
What do you think about the balance between the creative part and the long bureaucracy? Because large companies usually spend quite a lot of time, for example, on the approval of a press release.
I would not call it bureaucratic at all. but there is a difference between a small startup and large enterprise where processes and governance are in place to ensure real value generation and eliminate waste. Good part of Maersk is that while we have process and governance in place, we are equally agile to bring innovative ideas faster to life and that makes it special. With the shipping and logistics domain, there are regulations to follow and safety at stake and we ensure governance helps us to be right the first time.
Our transformation is focussed around innovative new products for our customers, ease of engaging with us through self service digital platforms and our optimized landscape of performing assets that are thread connecting global trade. We are leading our industry with customer centric solutions and bring new products and services for our customers through organic and inorganic channels. Everyday we have success stories from our frontline on how technology is enabling new capabilities that are helping our customers. We are hearing our customer’s voice and making improvements in our digital products and services to improve with very short turnaround time. We are leveraging cloud, DevOPS and agile practices to be fast and efficient.
Also to note we are an asset heavy organization with our assets moving and deployed globally, that means if we want to invest into any solution improving our assets, we need to find a global solution that can work on, let’s say, on sea, land and sometimes air across the globe. If we put an IoT device on our containers, then our containers go globally, we need to ensure that the solution is compliant of any regulations and legal requirements and at the same time viable financially. If we deploy a solution on our vessels, we need to take into account own and chartered vessels and we have more than 700 of these.
Within the domain I work, which is more related to assets, there is a time-frame that is needed to mature the idea, put it into the quick test and validation, and then roll it across the globe. What we encourage at Maersk is to be bold, test ideas successfully or fail and learn and then finally succeed. I would not say we have always been like that, but we are slowly maturing ensuring we embrace fail fast culture.
How many people work in your team?
We in technology are structured in an industry standard platform operating model. There are business platforms and enabling platforms. Business platforms enable value and outcomes and bring in technology and business outcome owners together. Enabling platforms are focused around enabling technology foundation needed for many business platforms to capitalize and deliver. We are a big enabling platform, called IoT & Automation platform. This platform has around 270 people and has 4 pillars — IoT, Automation, Industrial Infrastructure and Asset management. I lead Asset management pillar delivering improved management of our assets ensuring reliability in our operations.
We have a lot of core engineering capabilities in our team such as full-stack engineers, QA engineers, architects, UX designers, industrial engineers, automation specialists, infrastructure engineers and so on. We develop many foundation technology solutions and partners with leading technology and infrastructure service providers innovating state of art technology solutions.
Here in the head-office?
Team is spread across multiple geographies. We have a big team in Copenhagen, we have teams in Hague, we have teams in India, so we are spread across the globe.
What is the peculiarity of the Danish work culture? Is it easy for foreign employees to adapt to it? What would you advise them?
The good thing about the Danish work culture is that it gives you a lot of freedom, it ensures your work and personal life balance. When we come together as a multicultural team from countries like Denmark, India, Netherlands, Spain, UK, US and so on, we try to assimilate good from every culture. Here in Denmark we come together, speak a common language and ensure nobody feels left out. Our headquarter in Esplanaden has people from 80+ nationalities walking and working each day together.
We are a very collaborative team and we all go the extra mile sometimes. You can imagine that if you have such a big team and you have people from different time zones, bringing them to the meeting is a challenge, but we collaborate and sometimes we stretch to get up early in the morning, sometimes we stretch to pick up a call late in the evening after kids are asleep. But we do care for each other and we all enjoy working together. Bringing good from every culture is the key and respecting each other makes it easier.
In many Ukrainian companies, the goal is very important, the goal above all. And the process, how we go to this goal is not always important. In Denmark, I see that the most important thing is teamwork and how the team achieves the goal. How about this at Maersk?
I think this is where talent management and talent acquisition come into picture. We have a very strong talent acquisition process. It’s not about not hearing people’s point of view, but ensuring that we bring in the people who have the right mindset, and collaborative mindset. It’s not about me. It’s about us, it’s about the team, it’s about the value that we create for the organization. It’s not just the words that we use to say that it’s not about me, it’s about us. We have our talent management process that encourages us to focus on team objectives rather than personal achievements and hero culture. Good amount of weightage in our objectives is focussed around how we, as a team, achieve the ambition. We are a collaborative team and this helps to ensure shoulder responsibilities, working together to move the needle in the same direction and creating and fostering a culture of winning together, it helps us a lot.
Do you have any Ukrainians in your team?
We do have one Ukrainian.
Only one in such a big team?
When we open the positions, the positions are always open up for all the countries, all the religions, all the races. We really believe that diversity could be an inclusion. That means when we put up a job ad, we encourage everyone to apply, and we always try to bring in the best person who is suitable for the job. And yes, we have one Ukrainian for now, but I hope there will be more!
Is there any must-read book or article for IT specialists?
There are two parts to the normal reading that I do. One is more around technology articles. I read a lot of articles from the likes of Gartner, McKinsey etc., this helps me to be informed on how the technology is moving and what to expect in near and long term in future. This is a bit of a need in our space where we need to test, trial new technologies to make us smarter and efficient. When it comes to books and other great articles and words of wisdom, I try to follow and read whatever helps me improve as a leader. Whatever that helps me to work effectively, improve communication, learn and practice empathy. Some of my favorite books are The 7 Habits of highly effective people by Stephan Covey; Good to great by Jim Collins and so on. I also read some hindi stories to kids from India, my home country. It’s important for me to ensure that kids also get familiarized to some extent at least. Kids are already learning English, Danish and more languages so it is difficult but we try to make them familiar with literature from India.
Alla Shorina spoke with Siddhartha.
Even more ideas and meanings can be found in the speech Siddhartha Kulkarni here
We wrote about how Ukrainian startups presented their work at TechBBQ here.
Read about how the Association of Ukrainians in Denmark and Bevar Ukraine prepared for the war and what it did in the first weeks after February 24 in the interview of the Head of the Association Andrii Kuzmun.
A photo report by Alla Shorin from the Ukrainian towns of Bucha and Irpin in September can be viewed here.
The text in Ukrainian:
