A new home for new work

GEA Digital has a new home! GEA’s corporate start-up and group-wide network for digital innovation celebrated the opening of its GEA Digital HUB offices in Düsseldorf on June 28. Adjacent to GEA Group corporate headquarters in the Düsseldorf Airport City business park and 5 minutes from Germany’s third largest airport, the new workspace and meeting place is specially designed for bringing together GEA’s network of digital experts and facilitating flexible, creative and collaborative work.

“GEA Digital experts are working in close collaboration with engineering, sales and service colleagues across the company doing amazing things to take GEA equipment and software to the next level of productivity and sustainability. This is very important work for the company and important to establish this new physical presence as our home base,” says Tom Oelsner, Chief Digital Officer. “We chose Düsseldorf because we want to stay close to the business, which is a big part of the GEA Digital philosophy: delivering on digital innovation, but staying focused on our business, our products, and our customers.” 

The GEA Digital network consists primarily of a centralized Digital Hub along with several Digital Units housed in each of GEA’s divisions. The core purpose of the Hub is to deliver standardized GEA-wide platforms that help the Digital Units accelerate their development of successful customer applications. The new office space – the GEA Digital HUB – will serve as the home base for the Hub’s data and cloud engineers, software architects, data security specialists and developers. The offices are open-space with no assigned desks and no separate offices for management. Each Hub member will have to reserve their workstation space – a “hierarchy free zone” in keeping with GEA Digital’s start-up spirit.

Three out of the ten rooms across the floor are fitted with computer workstations – all with adjustable desks for sitting or standing. Employees, while having a personal locker to store belongings, are encouraged to work in different surroundings to keep meeting new colleagues and keep perspectives fresh.

In addition to providing a home base for Hub members, the space also serves as the central point of convergence for GEA Digital’s Group-wide network. “Our digital innovation teams that are based in the divisions (Digital Units) will make regular use of this space in order to work closely with their Hub colleagues – to discuss digital solutions, business needs, align with standards, and so on,” says Frederieke. “So all employees working at GEA Digital across the company can reserve a desk or workshop room here. GEA Digital is the connective tissue that brings the divisions together in pursuit of digital excellence at GEA; this space is designed to serve that purpose.”

“The exciting part about working at GEA Digital is that we’re making these amazing GEA technologies even more dynamic with the power of digitalization. And that’s probably the best way to describe this new HUB space: dynamic,” says Corinna Kiel, Business Engineer. “For us in the Hub team, the space provides the freedom to develop ideas together and create something truly impactful. I love coming to the office to meet the other Hub members; it’s definitely a new look and feel for GEA offices – and it’s the perfect team and place we have here to collaborate closely and inspire each other.”

GEA Digital plans to replicate the HUB office concept in each of its Digital Units over the next few years. If you’d like to learn more about us, feel free to get in touch with us and/or read more about our team below.