Context: In June 2017, TNT was hit by the NotPetya cyberattack. Our IT systems were down for several weeks: no tracking, no inventory visibility. Clients were nervous and some were looking at competitors.

Action: We moved the whole team to manual operations. We tracked shipments on paper and in Excel files. Team members called clients from their own phones, and some worked on their personal laptops. We also went to the warehouses to help sort goods and reduce the backlog.

One case shows what this looked like day to day. A major construction equipment manufacturer needed a critical part delivered urgently to the UK. The part was somewhere in our warehouse, but without IT the on-site team could not find it, and the client was escalating every hour. I had worked in that warehouse for four years and knew the layout by memory. I went there, searched the racks manually for 90 minutes and found it. I loaded it in my own car, drove 20 km to our operations hub, and booked a dedicated vehicle to the UK the same day.

Impact: The part was delivered on schedule. We kept operations running for several weeks without systems, and we did not lose a single client.

Year: 2017