Proactive resilience of firms due to COVID-19 outbreak

I Gayathri Nair , a student ding MBA was eating my brain trying to understand current pandemic and most importantly how to respond to such issues in future. After an intense research I was able to have an understanding which I would like to share with you.

How to plan and respond differently to pandemics:

Business disturbances caused by natural, man-made, technical or organizational failures and those caused by pandemic events are substantially different. Such disparities exist due to the potential for increased size, frequency and length of pandemic events, forcing organizations to move beyond conventional approaches for resilience planning.Companies will integrate pandemic preparation considerations into current resilience planning programs to provide a robust response and ensure the stability for their most important goods and services.

Key takeaways and next steps for leaders on how to plan and respond differently to pandemics

• Apply a people-first mindset :  At the start of a pandemic, the crucial problem businesses must answer is whether their workers are healthy, accompanied by whether they are available to carry out key services. Companies must be able to control the situation, have a secure environment and give their workers the help they need.

• Plan for geographical segmentation of activities: Organizations should pay greater attention to the geographical distribution of these essential activities and how to classify them for job transfer to alternative locations and sites. Companies should aim to diversify supplier base, consumers and third parties through geographies in order to avoid dependencies.

• Invest in technology and infrastructure :Businesses should invest in tools to enable staff to work remotely and virtually collaborate, evaluate their current bandwidth to support remote work, perform regular network stress testing, and identify workarounds for critical tasks that can not be performed from home.

• Engage with customers: Companies should continue to connect with customers via various channels, emphasize customer preferences as a priority and provide details to mitigate their grievances.

• Assess reliance on third parties: Companies have expanded interconnections with third parties, such as outsourced distributors, cloud service providers etc. Often vulnerable to pandemic events are certain third parties.Companies need to have a comprehensive understanding of their vital third , fourth and fifth parties and their contingency systems, and have alternative plans, such as insource strategies or find substitute if the ability of essential third parties to provide services is compromised.

Firms directly related to the COVID-19 epidemic are taking a range of steps to ensure there are no bottlenecks in supply chain logistics

• Communication is the key . It is imperative to keep the main supply chain providers about the increase or decrease in supply that will be necessitated by the fluctuations in the demand trend over the near future quarters

• To be armed at all times with essential data about the avenues of supply chain data at different entry points so determine the counteract possible detrimental effect

• To maintain a temporary inventory recovery and assessment process and to keep oneself aware of possible new procuring techniques to ensure steady flow of stock

•  Creating a stock pile of those commodities which are seen to be of  high demand but whose supply in relation to the demand is scarce ,in areas that are cordoned off and affected

•  Ensuring an ongoing network for movement of goods and service to areas not under lock and key and from ports closer to source so as to avoid the bottlenecks caused by time taken for transportation as well cost .

• Introduction of production of  other goods in the factories previously  producing goods to meet the demand in the Chinese sector

• Manipulate demand in relation to supply by providing a discount on the available inventory for maximizing late winter early spring revenue

• keep customers abreast with the delay expected at all times and to reallocate customer preference and priority to maximize short term sales profits and to avoid breach of contracts

• Tweaking a machinery ,changing the design or model to keep it up and running when the original spare parts or raw materials to produce  the spare parts are not available or is not easy to access

• Settling for per approved parts in those containment zones where the main service provider is affected but a supplementary provider is able to step in and fill the gap

•  Resorting to air for movement of freight ,to accelerate the movement of goods and service and thereby reduce the time lag which might occur if the waterways are relied on for the movement of freight