Pauline: Growing with the company
- 40 years
- Insights
From our very beginning as an air freight specialist with a small team at Vienna Airport to an international all-round transport and logistics provider with over 4,000 employees, only a few employees have accompanied cargo-partner for 40 years. One of these colleagues is Pauline – and she’s been part of our company’s exciting journey all along. Most recently she’s retired from work and now looks forward to a new era in her life. It’s right about time to pay our gratitude and respect while taking a look back at Pauline’s career and cargo-partner’s impressive development over the last four decades.
Pauline has been with cargo-partner since the very beginning. Her first tasks in the area of Administration included invoicing and the manual entry of every voucher into the “Bordero” book. Back then, in the 1980ies, it was a completely different time and some of our readers might not even remember it, as Pauline looks back: “It’s hard to imagine today, but back then, everything was managed via our ‘Bordero’ – a giant book where we manually entered all receipts and expenditures. At the end of the month, we added it all up with a mechanical calculator. We weren’t using computers, so each delivery note was written on a typewriter.”
Hearing of giant books and mechanical calculators might seem like a distant tale from a time far, far away. Today, with all areas of (work-)life permeated by digitalization, this sounds even more thrilling. How did they avoid mistakes archiving all these invoices and receipts? What happened if someone oversaw an error in a 5-pages long calculation? We will never know, because Pauline and her colleagues always reliably solved those challenges…
A significant change from analogue to digital
In 1986, the software traff400 was implemented and Pauline switched to the newly created IT department, which in the beginning consisted of only two people. “After a year, three more colleagues joined our IT team, and we grew from there,” laughs Pauline, noting the stark contrast to the size and importance cargo-partner’s IT departments enjoy today.
All in all, Pauline’s switch from “bookworm” to IT expert shows a typical shift that the industry – and with it, cargo-partner – underwent at the time. This is exemplary of the hands-on mentality that drives the company to tackle any new challenge, according to one of cargo-partner’s core values: “passion for excellence”.
Today, our IT departments have grown to over 150 employees worldwide and encompass a variety of job profiles. Up until most recently, Pauline was part of our IT Application Management team, and her responsibilities included application support, training and coordination for all our group-wide software solutions. Pauline knows cargo-partner’s IT systems inside and out, and she is the person we turn to when there’s a tricky IT Application issue in one of our offices around the world that nobody else can solve. It was her rich experience and her passion for her job that made her stand out as a “veteran” and an inspiring example for us all.
We are grateful that we have (and had) colleagues like Pauline on board and wish her all the best in her retirement. Thank you, Pauline!
40 years of cargo-partner
In 1983, cargo-partner CEO Stefan Krauter founded the company “air cargo partner” with only five people at Vienna Airport. Specializing in air freight at first, the small team soon began to expand its expertise to include sea freight services. Thanks to a growing network of trucking partners, the transport provider was able to handle pre- and on-carriage and offer integrated logistics solutions. Eventually, cargo-partner moved its headquarters to Fischamend while keeping air freight operations at Vienna Airport.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the logistics provider quickly began to make use of this ideally situated hub in Vienna to branch out to the neighboring countries in the east and was among the first logistics companies who ventured to Eastern Europe at the time. By the year 2000, cargo-partner had reached this goal and had set up offices in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, Germany and Romania with considerable success.
Around the same time, the company began to take increasingly large steps with its international expansion. In 2001, the logistics provider opened the first office in New York, followed by the first subsidiaries in China and Taiwan in 2004. Today, cargo-partner has 10 offices in the USA and is active in 14 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
It took the company four decades from its humble beginnings as a small team at Vienna Airport to an international all-round transport and logistics provider with over 4,000 employees in 2023. Here’s to another 40 years of success and satisfied customers!
40 years of cargo-partner
- 40 years
- Success Stories
From an airfreight specialist with a small team at Vienna Airport to an international all-round transport and logistics provider with over 4,000 employees. Let's take a look back...
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