System Administration for Stores and Telecommunications

I’M DANIEL AND I’VE BEEN WORKING AT ERNSTING’S FAMILY FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS

When I started at Ernsting's family back in 1998, we only had 750 stores and a small administrative building. Today we have 1,915 stores and work in a large, modern company building. I still really enjoy my job, even after working here for such a long time. During my time at Ernsting’s family, in addition to the huge growth of the company, I have also witnessed three changes to our checkout systems. This is always something very special for us when it comes to user service. We originally worked with NCR 7052 with DOS, but we now use UBUNTU Linux.

In addition to the content-related challenges, I really appreciate the great atmosphere in the company, my colleagues and the excellent workplace equipment. The company’s social commitment to its employees is also great. Working here is much more varied than working at a straightforward systems company. There are several interfaces to different operating systems and more extensive hardware.

HI, I’M GERRIT!

After my apprenticeship and a gap year, an acquaintance told me about Ernsting’s family as an employer. After that, everything moved quickly and just two weeks after sending in my application I had a new job. My colleagues welcomed me into the team warmly from day one and quickly integrated me into various areas of responsibility. I was surprised at how varied the tasks are, and above all else, I wasn’t aware of how big the company actually is. After five months, I took on my first really big project – converting the stores to All IP. In addition to the project work there are of course tasks that come up on a regular basis, such as managing the internet connections in all the stores or maintaining the telephone systems in the store and branch offices. We are also responsible for the communications and negotiations with the contractual partners. This means that there’s also a commercial side to my daily work.

INTERDEPARTMENTAL COLLABORATION

As a department, we are well networked in the company. In addition to our close collaboration within the team, we also work closely with our in-house system administration. When connecting new stores in particular, we also work with our colleagues from the Expansion team. For each new store connection that has to be established, technicians have to visit and the connections to our network have to be set up. Whenever there are problems with the telephone systems or checkouts, we work with various colleagues at our head office and in the stores. It can sometimes be difficult to be the “knight in shining armour” all the time, but it’s always great to be able to help with errors and problems.