Digital transformation can help your company survive Coronavirus
The rapidly developing threat to businesses from coronavirus is becoming increasingly evident with every news bulletin. With many companies evaluating the impact that losing staff to self-isolation and possibly illness is going to have on them, it’s worth considering the impact that having effective digital processes in place will have.
Those companies that have embraced cloud-based systems for their core business processes are going to be a lot better positioned to weather the coming storm than those still relying on manual processes. If your staff are reliant on resources that are only physically present in the workplace, be that paper-based systems or locally hosted systems, then unless your staff can also be present in the workplace, you have a major problem.
The coronavirus outbreak is highlighting one of the major benefits of moving systems and processes into the cloud, in that your key systems are available remotely. In the UK around 93% of households have internet access, meaning that the majority of staff will be able to access cloud-based company systems from home and carry on a large part of their daily work unaffected. Add to this messaging and collaboration systems such as Microsoft Teams and Slack and almost all the bases are covered.
There are other advantages too. We specialise in producing business workflow systems for our clients, where we translate manual or disconnected business workflows into cloud-based systems. As part of the process we help companies analyse their critical business workflows and translate these into well-defined and controlled paths through the system.
The collateral benefit of this, when placed in the context of coronavirus, is that if key members of staff become unavailable it’s a lot easier to delegate available staff to cover their functions, as the structure of the system will support and guide them through carrying out tasks that they may not be familiar with.
We all hope that the current situation is resolved quickly with the minimum of suffering both personally and commercially, however, it does highlight that implementing a successful digital transformation and moving business critical processes into the cloud could help your business survive the next time we face these extraordinary circumstances.