A guide to business continuity: 6 tips to manage uncertainty

With the world still in the center of the coronavirus pandemic, many of you will be adjusting to the 'new normal', creating a new reality in which the way you work has fundamentally changed.

With social distancing, remote working, and protective equipment now everyday necessities, it a critical time for businesses to make the right changes and shifts in the way they operate. How do you ensure business continuity? There is room for success if you manage people and processes better than your competition.

In this Business Continuity Guide, we support you to take the following steps to ensure your business prospers after the pandemic.

1. How to thoroughly review your processes

We discuss how to take a good look at your business and examine how you can operate going forward. The environment is extremely volatile and fluid, which means you need to get granular and create a detailed relaunch plan.

2. How to improve your customer experience

Even if your team is working remotely, your customers should not experience a weaker level of service during a major crisis. We share top tips to enact cultural change and make remote work viable for your team. If you are struggling with a distributed team right now, it is likely that your processes, training, or communication are the stumbling blocks - not the nature of remote working itself.

3. How to rethink the design of your supply chain

Today, we may be looking at an era of new supply chain design where businesses can be ultra-agile and responsive in dealing with changing policies, regulations, and natural disasters. We share with you some key ideas about how businesses can mitigate their impact by improving their supply chain preparedness. By putting the right plans in place before a disruption occurs, and testing and learning before the fact, you will put your business in the best possible position to keep moving and hopefully weather the storm.

4. How to handle your finances

As you start up again, you may have to create detailed financial models considering your cash flow and staff costs, as it may take some time to establish relationships with your customers and get the orders coming in again. With insight from companies such as Roush Yates Engines, we talk about how to stabilize cash flow and keep staff fully employed.

5. How to automate your workflow

For any firms that have not made the switch from paper routing sheets to an automated workflow system, the current environment should be a catalyst to make that leap. An automated workflow solution eliminates the need to move work between teams physically. But how to identify the bottlenecks that are occurring with your team working remotely - where is the work being held up? What requires people to go into the office when they do not need to? We look at designing and automating workflows to address these issues.

6. How to move to the cloud

Compared to physical systems, cloud backup is virtually endless. As your organization grows, your cloud solution grows with you at no risk to the additional data workload. Not only are you saving money by only paying for the storage space you need, but you can also easily add extra storage - here's where to start.

Looking for more tips? Download the guide