_2019 summary and growth perspectives in unexpected circumstances

Intensive development, constantly growing team of specialists, new technologies, locations (also outside of Poland), global clients and partners – that’s how we could sum up 2019. We have opened a new office in Poznan and Taipei (Taiwan), organized our own technology conference in 3 locations, shared knowledge at universities and conferences. The beginning of 2020 was very dynamic too. Even though the unforeseen development of events related to coronavirus surprised us no less than everyone else, we hope that it can still be a good year.

The year of expansion!

This term is the best representation of our overall activities in many areas. The growing demand for Industry 4.0 related services, requires a proportional increase in the number of specialists working on projects. As a result, in 2019, we crossed the magical number of 500 employees and beat the summer internship record. For 3 months in five locations, we have worked with over 80 young talents. 32 of them stayed with us after that as new hires.

To provide enough space for our team, we have also increased  our office space and opened new branches. Now you can find us in 5 Polish cities, and 3 locations abroad.

The opening of the Taipei office was the most important strategic decision of the year. This is a key location for us and a great starting point for further development in Asian markets. We chose a rather unusual direction for Polish business but going global means thinking global- moving beyond the scheme with a broader view of potential destinations. Of course, we took into consideration many barriers – primarily logistic and operational, resulting from the large distance between the new office and the company’s headquarters, but also cultural and communication ones.

It was a challenge for TTPSC to pioneer its way into this newly chosen location, but the key to success was finding the right people. Our core team in Taipei is equipped with excellent competences and expertise needed to stand up to the task.

Industry 4.0, AR, IoT, PLM & Cloud

If we were to describe 2019 in few words, that would be it! Those terms were most commonly used and heard, probably not only in our company. It’s safe to say that these slogans dominated the IT industry in general. The demand for services in these areas is still growing dynamically. This trend that we’ve observed is a global thing, so we are even more motivated to constantly work on our product portfolio and adapt it to the needs and standards of the international market.

A lot has happened in the Augmented Reality technologies, both in the context of team development and the intensification of our activities. The most modern self-supporting augmented reality device – Microsoft HoloLens2 – has also appeared on the market, and we had the opportunity to test it. The dissemination of these technologies still has a long way to go, and we want to be a part of this! That’s why we focused a lot on education and popularization of the solutions that are currently available to few but may soon revolutionize almost any business.

Projects & development 

For now, we can already talk about some examples of successful implementation of the AR technology. Last year in cooperation with Vestas, we delivered a hands-free experience, based on the RealWear HMT-1 headset. It detects the location of the employee, displays the tasks to perform, assigned to a specific position, and provides a person with unlimited access to the necessary knowledge (specifications, instructions, documentation, training materials). Thanks to this, it can significantly improve the onboarding and training programs leading to better-managed production processes.

Another milestone for our business development was the creation of a department focused on Cloud Computing. It enabled us to extend our offer with strategy, migration and management services, but also to enrich existing solutions with the revolutionary possibilities of cloud technology.

Together with Gentherm, a global market leader and developer of innovative thermal management technologies, we had a chance to work on a very interesting project that allowed us to use the broad and interdisciplinary capabilities of our team. It was focused on the improvement of the system that our partner was using for documentation management. Its functionalities were not sufficient for Gentherm and they wanted to make significant improvements. As a part of the project, we migrated the entire system to the Amazon Web Services cloud, automated solutions following the DevOps methodology, updated and expanded the functionality of the Windchill system on which this solution is based. The changes we introduced allowed a significant increase in system performance and accelerated the process of implementing changes.

For 2019, we assumed the continuous dynamic growth in activities related to Industry 4.0 – AR, IoT, Cloud Services. We can proudly say that we succeeded! We achieved 135% of our goal and reached a noteworthy level of the company revenues- more than 100 million PLN.

Expectations vs reality?

We have started 2020 with even more ambitious plans. Than COVID-19 happened and forced everyone to verify their assumptions and focus on minimizing losses instead of making big plans.

In terms of organization, switching to remote work was not a problem for us. We were offering the possibility of a home office to our employees for a long time. This way it was easier to adapt and reduce the number of people staying in our offices to the absolute minimum while making sure that business processes are not threatened in any way. Currently, we are still working on the implementation of projects for our clients and are constantly monitoring the situation on global markets (approximately 80% of our projects are the ones from outside Poland).

This sudden and unexpected situation of the epidemic resulted in an even faster-growing interest in Industry 4.0. More and more companies are looking for solutions for remote monitoring, remote support or predictive maintenance. We can help them, and we are ready to do so, at any time.

We are still hiring new talents (through remote recruitment processes) and planning further foreign expansion as soon as possible.

Our strong focus at this point is communication- within teams and the organization. We honestly talk about everything, to make sure that every employee knows exactly what the company’s current situation looks like. We believe that speaking openly about every aspect (including doubts, threats, and possible difficulties) is necessary for us to trust each other and work as an efficient team even in the reality of social distancing.

Despite the unusual conditions, we are not slowing down. Doing our best to think about the future with optimism, while closely monitoring the dynamic development of the situation and adapting to new challenges.