When Ralf applied for a job at Quooker two years ago, something caught his attention while he was waiting at reception. ‘Everyone who walked past had a smile on their face.’ It immediately gave him a good feeling. ‘Clearly, people enjoyed orking here.’ Not long afterwards, he was walking through the Quooker building as an employee himself. ‘It’s a great place to work. And if you have a passion for IT, there are plenty of opportunities to put it into practice here.’

Technology in a field Not long after joining Quooker, Ralf heard about the plans to move to a new Quooker facility that was yet to be built at the Nieuw Reijerwaard business park. It presented Ralf and his team with a considerable challenge. ‘You have to imagine: the new site was nothing more than a field. There was nothing there. No power, no network cabling. There was a design for the new building, but the entire IT infrastructure still had to be worked out. My team was given carte blanche. There was an incredible amount for us to think through together: where should the server rooms be located? How many server racks would we need? Where would people be working who needed network access and Wi-Fi? How many access points would we need? How many switches? It was, and still is, a huge challenge.’

The QDC has moved That first major step has now been completed. The Quooker Distribution Center, previously located at Heijplaat in Rotterdam, has moved to the new facility in Ridderkerk, where Quooker now has a fully automated warehouse. The relocation of the QDC is the first phase of a larger plan for the future. In time, production, offices and the showroom will also move to Nieuw Reijerwaard, ultimately bringing different parts of Quooker together in one location.

For IT, getting the QDC up and running meant everything had to work from the very first day. ‘All the cables had to be in the right place, the servers had to be running, the computers had to be set up and the handheld scanners had to work. The warehouse management & control system had to be fully operational, and the connections between the webshop, warehouse, shipping partner and dealer all had to work properly. It was an enormous undertaking, but that’s exactly what made it so much fun.’

A secure network Ralf also used the relocation as an opportunity to improve Quooker’s network. ‘Security is a major topic these days, so we set out to make our server environment redundant – in other words, resilient in the event of a failure,’ he says. ‘Our new data centre in Alblasserdam provides disaster recovery in the event that the Nieuw Reijerwaard site goes down.’ What Ralf and his team have built is designed to support Quooker for the next fifteen years. ‘Quooker will continue to grow during that time, which means there are plenty of exciting projects ahead for our department,’ says Ralf. ‘For IT professionals who enjoy challenges and variety, Quooker really is the place to be.’

Posted on 10-08-2026