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How DO You Reopen Your Business?
George Moakley
July 13, 2020
How DO You Reopen Your Business?
Sheltering in place is making a difference; more and more regions are seeing a slowing of infection rates.
Soon, when your region is ready, you’ll have the chance to reopen your business.
Do you have a plan?
As your community progresses from ‘Flattening the Curve’ to ‘After the Apex’, until there a vaccine is widely deployed to achieve ‘herd immunity’, we still need to protect the vulnerable to avoid overwhelming our health care infrastructure with a second wave of infection.
This translates into a practical challenge for your company; how DO you reopen your business?
There are infrastructure services that will need to be put in place. We’ll need an adequate testing capability involving two kinds of tests.
Every individual will need periodic testing for antibodies in order to understand whether they are vulnerable, and every individual will need to be screened before entering any venue for which social distancing is impractical (e.g., mass transit). Screening will determine whether people are actively infectious. Such testing will need to be on a VERY large scale, with nearly immediate results, conducted with an edge intelligence platform connected to public health infrastructure.
Where necessary, your business operations will be able to rely on this testing infrastructure. To do so, you’ll need to work through the mechanics of how to do so. This will involve integrating applicable business processes with public health infrastructure through service interfaces that have not yet been defined.
Where possible, your business operation will need to continue to insert technology between people so they can work together apart.
Between co-workers, you’ll continue to employ conferencing tools, collaboration applications, workflow management solutions, and so forth. If your company wasn’t using such tools before the pandemic, you’ve probably been forced to deploy them rapidly and, in all likelihood, that rapid deployment is not as productive and effective as you’d like it to be. Even if your company was already using such tools before the pandemic, you’ve been forced to expand their use, discovering all sorts of limitations, including whether your employee’s homes have adequate bandwidth.
Between your employees and their external contacts (e.g., customers, suppliers, and partners), you’ll also need to insert technology. That will come down to two classes of technology.
One is the ability to extend the aforementioned conferencing, collaborative, and workflow management tools across corporate boundaries.
The other is expanded or novel automation solutions. These include expanding the scope and role of automated point of sale systems (e.g., kiosks), customer support systems (e.g., down the wire manageability and repair), automated customer relationship management capabilities, fulfillment systems, inventory distribution tracking, asset tracking, etc.
These expanded or novel automation systems will be disruptive. Their deployment will be partially in the cloud with devices deployed in the real world, connected back to your company through telecommunications interfaces that, depending on locations, may be expensive, constrained, or unreliable. They will need to be provisioned and maintained, with down-the-wire and out-of-band monitoring, diagnostics, and repair.
Bottom lines?
There’s a lot of complexity, you don’t have a lot of time, and you’re probably dealing with business disruptions impacting your cash flow.
So, what you’ll need is a roadmap. A pragmatic, practical, Digital Transformation Roadmap that lays out a series of small, incremental steps with real and quick financial benefits to not only help your business survive but thrive.
And that roadmap needs to provide a foundation for a strategic plan that builds on the small, incremental steps, because you won’t want to rip out your near-term investments when we get to ‘The New Normal’ in 12-18 months.
Let us help you craft your Digital Transformation Roadmap
Digital Transformation Call to Action
Digital Transformation is what we do.
We can help you keep your business running today and plan for the new normal.
#YourBusinessGoesOn
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