Welcome to the first episode of season two of the Putting the Human into technology podcast. We call it the PHIT Podcast. This is the first of a two-part interview.

In the first episode of season two, we are joined by Jono Atherton of Interfood, we have a great time chatting with Jono and had an interesting discussion around the title of the episode, we were torn between “Never turn an opportunity down” and “I drank my way around the world”

Have a listen/watch/read and let us know what title you would have selected.

The Questions

1. Tell me a little about what you do, your business, job / role?
2. Thinking about the (people and/or technology impacts of the) last year, what lessons will you take forward and how do you see these being delivered?
3. Do you think users have grown in their confidence in using technology since lockdown?
4. What’s the best piece of business and/or career advice you’ve been given?

The Links

You can listen to the podcast on Anchor and all other good podcast platforms.

You can view – I drank my way around the world – Jono Atherton Part 1 on YouTube

Previous Episodes

You can catch up on season one here

Previous Series

• Series 1

Key Takeaways

• I drank my way around the world
• If you can slice, put it in a packet…we can do it
• Never turn an opportunity down!
• Never turn down a beer!

The Transcript

Question 1 – Tell me a little about what you do, your business, job / role?

Jono Atherton  01:36

So Interfood are a distributor for German food processing machinery, but on an industrial scale, so kind of, you know, maybe 100 tonne a day of product getting sliced, packaged, and then distributed. We do whole line solutions from X ray and through to check weigh and slicing and then packaging as well.

The role that I do here is all the internal ops. So everything that you’d expect from essentially a headquarters business, except finance, so…warehouse and distribution, marketing, IT, sales, service, administration, all that kind of stuff. So, no day is the same. Because unfortunately, some of our customers are also internal. So that pain doubles.

What did you do before that Jono?

Jono Atherton  03:18

I’m ex-military. I joined the military late 2003 had a great time 15 years, 10 years infantry where I drank my way around the world, a little bit exercise in the middle and decided I need to have something I could do when I left the military so I went into logistics, specialized in aviation fuel. I left the military to carry on doing aviation fuel in the civil sector. I was living out of a suitcase and decided I wanted a bit of home life as well, so made the conscious decision to take a job three miles from my front door and now I live the merry life where I ride a bike ride to work on my bike, not this morning obviously because of the weather, but I have a lovely ride to work in the morning. Work life balance is exactly where it needs to be

Question 2 – what lessons will you take forward and how do you see these being delivered?

Jono Atherton  05:49

Interesting actually, like you just said half of our workforce already worked from home or wherever they are on the customer site. But when lockdown did happen, and we needed people in the office home, it was almost as though we had, we had a challenge doing it, because we didn’t understand how we were going to work from home, we knew we could do it, but it was just how we’re going to do it.

But you know, luckily, and I say, luckily, I only started here in December before lockdown, but six months before that IT had rolled out Teams, and SharePoint. And I think that was a god save in itself. The VPN is historically quite slow, and people have issue with their own home Wi Fi. So we’re extremely lucky in that, that just happened. And, you know, it was only when I got here that we started moving, what would have been stored on our communal drive, over to SharePoint. So that took away a lot of pain that I think we would have had, had we have been a year earlier. Yeah, I mean, you know, the ERP that we operate on, it wasn’t in the cloud. We essentially had several laptops set up around the building, acting as servers that people could come into, which then meant people were having to roster when they had access to each server. So you know, we made the best of a bad situation.

On one hand, if it happened a year earlier, we’d have been without Teams and SharePoint, on the other, if that happened two years later, would have been in the cloud with our ERP, and it’d have been a lot less painful. So positives and negatives. But I think the important thing for us is that our customers, internal and external, didn’t really notice a difference. And obviously, because we work in the food industry, the tempo never changed. If anything, it increased, so we managed to keep

Question 3 – Do you think users have grown in their confidence in using technology since lockdown?

Jono Atherton  09:52

100%! Whilst it is hugely about technology for us…it’s communication for us…which Teams has helped massively. We’ve got one big office. So if there’s something going on, people get up and they walk across to each other, they can have that conversation. It’s done. And that was one of my concerns…But actually, Teams alleviated that, we’ve got several different Teams channels for guys that work together routine.

So sales and warehouse, they’ve got their own chat. And actually in between the warehouse and some of the teams, it’s removed that obstacle because the warehouse physically dislocated from what I call the Office team. So actually, it’s brought in closer with communication.

But yes, confidence wise, people are now using Sharepoint, believe it or not, I got a link sent to me the other day instead of an actual attachment. There’s definitely a lot and what’s helped is all the way through the, as you call it, the dark ages or the dark stage of lockdown, we’ve been working this ERP implementation plan all along as well. So not only have we technology to help then, we’ve been driving technology for the future, I think it’s the momentum has always been there. And the positive attitude towards it.

Question 4 – What’s the best piece of business / career advice you’ve been given?

Jono Atherton  11:57

For me, it’s got to be never turn an opportunity down. Take it, run with it. Even if you don’t know how to do it. Just cope with it until you can do it. You know, and that’s not just opportunities in the workplace, never turn down a beer, you never know who you’re going to meet and what you’re going to come across. At the end of the working day when everyone just goes, just have a beer, you always get them a few people who are I’ve still got this to do…it’s still going to be there in the morning! And it might alleviate some of those problems.

Useful Links

Attend our SQL training course in February – View more details here

Attend our Power BI training in March – You can view more details here