The coronavirus outbreak has impacted millions globally. First and foremost, a human tragedy, the damage extends beyond sickness and loss of life. In what seemed like an instant, the global economy has changed, maybe forever.
As the pandemic continues to spread, companies are forced to respond on the fly to the enormous challenges of nation-wide social distancing measures, regional stay-at-home orders, and localized health impacts. Subsequent volatile markets, government regulations, and unpredictable consumer demands have required businesses to adjust and scale organizational performance and capacity.
The problem for many is a lack of experience building a business strategy during a time of crisis or disruption. Moreover, the tremendous uncertainty and ambiguity arising in these exceptional circumstances only add to the complexity of designing the best path forward to deliver on a new vision and subsequent goals for the company.
That’s why business resiliency planning matters more now than ever before.
Developing a business resiliency strategy allows companies to adapt to opportunities that present themselves during times of substantial disruption. With the right business resiliency strategy, manufacturing, retail, food, and beverage, utilities, and services (from ISPs to flooring to home security), sectors can all benefit. Whether it’s pivoting production lines to meet changing demands or shifting business priorities to serve customers online and execute a digital sales strategy, companies can leverage business resiliency to develop new approaches and improve existing processes.
What is business resiliency?
A 21st-century term, business resiliency encompasses its 20th-century predecessors: crisis management and business continuity. A resilient business mitigates and responds to all types of risk that an organization may face, from pandemics to natural disasters to security and more. In addition to addressing significant incidents, business resiliency includes adapting to the new environment and circumstances left in its wake.
Business resiliency planning identifies the novel strategies and precise steps needed to survive and thrive in an increasingly volatile and disruptive environment. It involves strategic risk assessment and management, as well as optimizing through technology. Moreover, it consists of developing enterprise systems for fast, flexible business transformation that encompasses building multiple plans for multiple possible futures, which are all projected using existing data and modeling techniques.
In the U.S., this can already be seen at play since the COVID-19 outbreak. Food and beverage companies have shifted production to make hand sanitizer. Automobile manufacturers are building ventilators. These companies responded to the immediate crisis by reconfiguring the business to achieve new goals. This is business resiliency at its finest.
What hinders many companies from building and achieving the right business resiliency strategy moving forward involves many variables: a fragmented view of business, a lack of experience in responding to major events, as well as rigid, cumbersome legacy systems and in-house applications.
With proper business resiliency planning, an organization can overcome these challenges with improved operations and integrated systems that safeguard people, assets, and brand equity. And resilient business leaders operate by turning disruption into opportunities for growth.
Why business resiliency services?
Companies can leverage business resiliency services that do more than manage disruption. They accelerate market, brand, and category growth. With the right consulting partner, organizations can design new business opportunities that meet consumer demand and provide value. They can modify products and services to changing markets by leveraging integrated data and applications from enterprise technology. Moreover, they can take advantage of cloud, mobile, and other technologies to work collaboratively and serve customers with a digital marketplace.
For instance, a food and beverage manufacturer can design enterprise systems, such as open source ERP, to accelerate production to meet increased demand or create a whole new line of products based on changed consumer behavior. They can respond using data that provides a consolidated view of the business. They can also use analytics to build projections around possible future scenarios.
As part of the process, they can leverage technology solutions and strategies to simplify, shorten, and enhance all types of workflows. They can build products faster, narrow delivery times, and provide exceptional services. They can develop digitization strategies to produce new goods and services quicker and more efficiently, or make available new offerings that stretch across channels, including mobile and IoT-enabled devices used by consumers at home or on the run.
Business resiliency allows companies to level-up operations by defining, designing, and executing organizational capacities, including warehouse fulfillment, inventory, the supply chain, distribution, field service management, sales, marketing, and digital service delivery. The right business resiliency services can not only design and exploit new opportunities but optimize current operations. You leverage a new-found clarity, vision, action, and results that improve all aspects of the business:
- Accounting: Improve capturing, tracking, and reporting revenue, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and more so you gain an accurate assessment of the health of your business.
- Order intake: Streamline the order-to-cash process by connecting sales and fulfillment to pricing, invoices, returns
- Production: Get new products to market faster, with lower costs and higher quality, by leveraging real-time visibility and traceability into processes.
- Omnichannel: grow and expand through e-commerce using seamless data derived and accessible from CRM to inventory to the website.
- Sales: leverage CRM to understand the entire customer lifecycle and strengthen customer relationships. Access a flow of information from lead through to opportunity, sales order, fulfillment, renewal, upsell, cross-sell, and support.
- Data: With real-time data analysis and visualization tools, your organization can see immediate changes in market demand, enabling rapid decisions around adaptability.
Business resiliency drives new opportunities as well as improves existing systems and workflows. Using the power of enterprise technology, whether based on existing proprietary systems or newly implemented open source solutions, companies can decide where and how to dedicate resources using data-driven insight and powerful analytics. Moreover, they can leverage cloud capabilities to ensure continuous service for customers wherever they exist.
OSI customers talk about their resiliency strategies at OSICON 2020.
How OSI business resiliency empowers you
OSI has experience providing a myriad of business and IT consulting services that rapidly transform organizations to mitigate risk and bolster preparedness. Small and mid-sized business owners can rely on a true partner to develop clear objectives, roles, and responsibilities based on previous experience and expertise in crisis management, business continuity, and growth strategies in volatile markets. Moreover, OSI understands how to implement change management for its customers.
OSI can specifically help identify business initiatives and systems no longer relevant in the new market place. This enables the rapid execution of unique strategies tailored to emerging demands to deliver the most value to the organization and consumer. This can include reducing costs and increasing opportunities using integrated, end-to-end IT that underpins the overarching business.
Also, business owners can rely on consultants with in-depth industry knowledge, high technical IT skills, and detailed familiarity working directly with clients to solve macro-level challenges as well as micro-level difficulties. They can engage with staff equipped with actual “boots on the ground” experience, from 9/11 to natural disasters like SARS and hurricane Katrina, to catastrophes like the 2008 financial crisis.
OSI excels at helping companies reassess strategies, as well as supporting new processes and areas of optimization. The company understands how to lend its expertise to help shape a new way of doing business. That can include enterprise software as one part of the process.
A proficient consultant can provide the right data integration capabilities, including walking clients through each step involved. They can help automate processes that reduce redundancy, data entry, and errors. They can integrate systems and applications to increase visibility and access. Staff gain the ability to leverage analytics and reporting tools from any location to empower a mobile workforce with actionable data that delivers meaningful insights.
The result is your ability to respond to current conditions and the new economy, based on digitally empowering your people wherever they work or reside. The organization can take advantage of smarter, faster data-driven decisions at every level of the company, from the executive to the very edge of the enterprise.
The business benefits:
- Turn market volatility into a business driver
- Develop new business models and digital initiatives
- Synchronize and streamline workflows
- Maximize resources, reduce waste, and increase value
- Eliminate manual labor, redundancy, and errors
The dawning of the resilient organization
The future of business will rely on organizations bolstered by trusted, reliable, and flexible business resiliency planning. And the fastest, most efficient way forward in this endeavor involves leveraging the right consultant with deep experience developing new risk mitigation strategies that both bolster and grow the business.
By creating and executing a well-planned, experience-tested business strategy combined with customized enterprise software solutions, organizations can meet the 21st-century challenges, including risk management, crisis response, and business continuity. Moreover, they can adapt and respond to disruption with innovation and speed that only comes from true digital transformation.
Want to learn more about how to build a business resiliency strategy? Contact us at https://www.opensourceintegrators.com/contact.
What kind of business challenges do you face in field service management? How could open source applications help you grow? Comment below.
About the author:
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Greg Mader is the founder and president of Open Source Integrators (OSI), a global leader in open source business consulting and IT services. He’s an Army Veteran and entrepreneur, adept at managing large teams and complex projects, delivered on time and budget. His background includes leading and developing large and small teams, with a focus on communication, mission relevance, and improved deliveries. His expertise spans across strategic planning, project management, ERP, GIS, and other enterprise technologies. |
