New ways for the businesses to adapt their operations to the future Post CoronaVirus
Businesses start getting back to normal step-by-step as the global lockdown eases. There are more cars on the roads and more companies open up again. There is a " back to school" feeling in the air as some people call it "Project Re-start" and others are more cautious. And however you personally feel about it, there is no denial that a lot has to be done.
Companies will be working out new ways to get their employees back in the offices and working safely. Supplies will need re-ordering and everyday processes re-booting. Sectors, like hospitality, may have to stay mothballed for a bit longer before it’s wise to re-open and demand picks up, but even if that’s you – there is a feeling that now is a time for preparations to be made.
Business Decisions
There is a whole lot more to it than just pulling off the dust sheets. It’s more than asking “how do we get back to where we were before?” There are new questions being asked and those are about how to do things differently, better, more safely and more flexibly.
Every business that wants to return to growth will need to make some important decisions and ask questions like,
- Can we afford to continue what we did before or do we take the opportunity to make changes?
- What lessons have been learned and what elements did we find missing when lockdown hit?
For many it was the lack of digital and cloud services that caused disruption in business operations as all employees moved to working from home.
According to Susan Galer of SAP,
“Companies (have been) reprioritizing anything that supports remote work, like ecommerce to bring food and supplies to people who can’t leave their homes. They’ve also realized they need far more visibility across the organization to manage disrupted supply chains, urgent workforce shifts, and lightning fast financial urgencies.”
Time to change the way we were
The process of change has been accelerated during lockdown. The British parliament has used electronic voting for the first time and court proceedings have been heard remotely. The concept of digital transformation – a meaningless buzzword to many – now seems to have a renewed relevance and urgency.
Being able to work from anywhere, with access to all your data via the cloud is no longer a “nice to have“ – it is now a business necessity and will continue to be so in a future post Covid-19. You could be working from half-way around the world or you could be working at home – either way you are going to benefit from being able to get the full picture of your business – its processes and data, in real time.
It’s not just visibility and accessibility though – you also need agility. From now on you need to have the power to change things quickly. To scale up or down according to circumstances – to tailor what you do to a rapidly changing picture. To do this you need access to insights – analytics and data visualisations that help you make those moves in response to changes we can’t predict.
Use cloud ERP to build a strong business base
ERP can help to do this. If you are starting from scratch with technology that can sound daunting but it needn’t be and honestly, getting something in place now could be a smart choice to protect business in the future.
With timescales telescoping, the lengthy procurement processes of old and months of bespoke work don’t make sense anymore. So, “out-of-the-box” solutions which can be put in quickly and build on the best practices of all the other businesses that have come before you, make a lot of sense. For example an ERP “lite” system like Express Financials can provides a really strong base. It joins up and automates financial processes and gives decision makers access to real time business data, analytics and reports as standard and can be expanded further as required.
"Home office" is working
About Incloud Solutions, UVARs member UK:
In Cloud Solutions has been established in 2012. The company specializes in one product, the SAP Cloud ERP solution called Business ByDesign and considers it as the best in the class of Global SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions and the largest in the UK.
Author: Lucy Thorpe
stronger than one