Every day now, Covid-19 is dominating the headlines. Events are canceled or postponed, bans and lockdowns are restricting our freedoms. For working culture, however, this state of emergency could be an opportunity. An opportunity to further introduce working from home.
More and more companies have started to follow public health expert recommendations by implementing extended periods of “work from home initiatives”. Big tech companies like Google, Twitter and Amazon are offering home office for many or all of their employees around the globe. In China what has been called “the largest teleworking experiment in the world” is underway. With the emergency, the authorities imposed a forced closure on local companies that now have to adopt new methods to ensure the continuity of their services.
Software supports working from home
In this challenging environment, companies are faced with the question: is the enterprise fully capable of acting and performing under these new working conditions? Managing home office can be complex and requires a certain level of organization. Fortunately, the software world offers many useful tools that facilitate the process. From planners, shared calendars, software in the cloud to software tools that helps to organize video calls and meetings.
Transport planners: working from home efficiently
And what about professionals in the mobility sector? Can transport planners just access their traffic planning tools easily from home? What technical possibilities do they have to continue to work efficiently?
“Just like us at PTV, many of our customers are now working remotely. At home they might have our software on their computers, but detached from their licensing system or hardware dongles”, says Christian U. Haas, CEO at PTV. “In this current exceptional situation, we want our customers to be able to make full use of their software product at home and continue to work productively with their traffic model. Thus, we support them with pragmatic and uncomplicated assistance, even mobile licensing access for our software.”
Users connected to their company network (through a VPN) for example have the possibility to use “network” licenses”. What does this mean? The network user can continue to use the software without the need to physically have the dongle for the management of the license. This also allows multi-user access.
Another important feature that facilitates the remote use of PTV software is the possibility for multiple users to share the same information on which they are working, for example the transport model, through usage of a centralized scenario management database. All information is stored in one database and users can access and work with it.